- The Telephone Companies will quickly copy the technology and take advantage of their dominant market position;
- embedded devices have historically failed;
- the music industry will not tolerate the massification of the iPod;
- No one will surf the internet on a screen as small as a phone;
- users will not tolerate typing on a screen without keys.
What could have been the cause of such a mistake regarding the most successful product of modernity?
The “experts” did not see the paradigm shift. They evaluated the technology with the previous paradigm, when the iPhone itself did not exist. This dynamic is repeated in the history of technological change. The same thing happened with the Internet, the telephone or the car.
And the same thing is happening with Bitcoin, or Crypto in general as a new technological paradigm. For those of us who are for the paradigm shift, the price of the day is not the most important thing. Surely it is better to build products on something that is worth 60,000 and not 20,000. But that difference is not essential and not even a definitive variable to continue building. That said, let’s focus on the paradigm shift, to avoid the same fate as the hasty critics of the iPhone.
In 2009, with Bitcoin, Blockchain technology was born, which supports the crypto ecosystem. This is the first time in all of human history that a payment or obligation can be made permanently and definitively without the need for a central third party to vouch for. And this changes the world forever! This changes the organizational paradigm of many current applications, which require a central third party: an arbitrator, to provide security and confidence to the parties. For example money, or property records, or educational diplomas, or anything that today uses a state seal. Lately these arbitrators have become bureaucratic, expensive, inefficient and in some cases corrupt.
Those who build on this new paradigm are not just looking to make easy money with a volatile asset. As a trader I can assure you that there is no easy money in volatile assets, on the contrary. They are looking to change the world! The money will come by itself, surely with the adoption of the products that are built, but it is a consequence, and not the main objective. Those who do not see a new paradigm can only evaluate this entire system from the perspective of the old paradigm, seeing a way to speculate on a volatile asset. This segment exists and has an impact on the daily price, but the real long-term impact, the implementation, the massive adoption, will come from the hand of the new products that -like the IPhone- add value to people’s daily lives.
With Ehtereum also comes DeFi, which in short is the construction of a decentralized finance ecosystem, with the same financial products offered by financial systems, but free and decentralized. It is still early. The development is incipient. The natural purification of any technological leap, self-regulation, and even interaction with traditional financial systems are missing. That will take time and learning. Several versions, such as the iPhone that is almost fortnight.
If you still believe that crypto is a list of currencies, created as an opportunistic act of speculation; if you don’t understand how it can have value if nobody supports it; if you doubt that it can hold value because it cannot be touched; if you think it’s not going to generate value because unlike stocks, there’s no company here that sells things… Do yourself a favor, the hasty critics of the iPhone didn’t do themselves. study it! There are hundreds of videos, podcasts, many books, and even graduate courses. Give yourself an early opportunity to understand the new paradigm. The price will seem the least of it. It doesn’t matter when you read this.
Economist. Professor of Crypto&Blockchain at UCEMA (@aroisenzvit)
Source: Ambito
