Blockchain and the Race Towards Irrelevance

By May 15, 2016Bitcoin Business

Matthew Spoke is a bitcoin and Ethereum enthusiast who has been working towards advancing the use of smart distributed protocols through Rubix, a team at Deloitte dedicated to this vision.

In this opinion piece, Spoke argues it remains to be seen whether blockchain can be a disruptive or complementary technology, even while many incumbents are investing on the belief it’s the latter. If 2013 and 2014 were the years of the bitcoin exchange, then surely 2016 is the year of the enterprise blockchain. In other words, there seems to be a common understanding in the community that somehow, someone, somewhere needs to make blockchain technology more familiar and consumable for large companies looking to leverage it.

Whether they are building using the bitcoin protocol, the Ethereum protocol or something else entirely, there now exist a number of startups for which this is their purpose. Of course, within that group, different companies have chosen different strategies and different areas of focus.

These companies may be differentiated by underlying protocols, or by industry and use case, but they all share a common goal.

On a daily basis, when I talk to large companies about blockchain solutions, I often find myself questioning the underlying message of what I’m promoting. On the one hand, I recognize the enormous importance of corporate innovation, and the need for large established companies to challenge their status quo.

I firmly believe that there is a role for today’s "intermediaries" and "third parties" (as they’ve collectively been bucketed in the context of blockchain technology) to drive the shift towards a more efficient and less centralized future.

But on the other hand, I also see the irony of this suggestion.

As was the common rhetoric in the earlier days of bitcoin, blockchains open the potential for the disintermediation of not only these established businesses, […]

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