What's Wrong With Blockchain?

Originally Posted at: Crypto News Network

Cryptocurrency is one of the most captivating innovations of the 21st century, but it needs a lot of work. There are a few issues I have with the cryptocurrency space currently, most of which are not easily solved but still need addressing.

I don’t want readers to think that I’m a pessimist, or some “nocoiner” that hates blockchain and cryptocurrency, I’m quite the opposite really. I love blockchain and I dedicate my work and free-time to researching the space on a daily basis. The problem in crypto lies within the echochamber that often envelops community as a whole, which makes it hard to look at from an outside perspective.

From the outside looking in, these problems facing blockchain make people question the legitimacy of the industry as a whole. The biggest obstacles in my opinion are all social problems: Volatility, Shady People, and Lack of Consistency and Standard.

When trying to talk to people about crypto and blockchain, the biggest roadblock is always Volatility. Cryptocurrency is touted as the holy grail for the unbanked and for the less fortunate, painting a picture of optimism and utopia for those who may have been left behind due to lack of industrialization or subjectivity to a corrupt government. While cryptocurrency certainly is capable of helping people in those situations, I have a hard time thinking its the end-all-be-all solution for at-risk people.

Many might argue “Well having *insert coin name* is better than a hyper inflated national currency run by a corrupt government” and to that, I agree completely. But to imagine some volatile asset encompassing one’s life savings is sad to think about, especially when talking about people who are inherently at-risk due to circumstances out of their control. Those who have the benefit of living in economically stable countries scoff at those who want to dump all their money into crypto, so why is that ok for vulnerable people to do so?

Shady people in crypto are why people raise an eyebrow when they hear about blockchain. The sheer amount of garbage in crypto is blinding, and it makes it difficult to sift through in order to find legitimate growth of ideas and innovation. A majority of people interested in crypto are there only because of their personal greed. I’m talking about people who talk about a new ICO every week, or people shilling something as “the next bitcoin”. If crypto collectively gave a yearly ROI of 3% how many of these people would have been interested in the first place?

There are too many people that believe in quick money. A lot of these people don’t have a huge depth in technical knowledge so they trust others whom they believe to be telling the truth, and invest accordingly. If you come looking for money and nothing else in this space, I don’t think this is the right place for you. Its ok if you came to crypto because you heard about the money, but there are more important things at stake. To quote Andreas Antonopolous, “Come for the money, stay for the principle.”

I should also refute my own last statement because that hype does help to an extent. If you look at other existing industries such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, those have been around for decades, yet most people have just started hearing about it. That progression has been gradual yet slow. The innovations and expectations in blockchain move at a breakneck speed. Most of the driving force behind that rapid progression is the direct monetary incentive. So in a way, it’s a necessary evil, but one that makes me cringe nonetheless.

Lack of consistency is an interesting problem, and probably the most difficult to solve. With ICOs that pop up on a daily basis touting a new platform and solution to some problem, I think of the users. Say there are 5 dApps that have raised funding and from ICOs, all with their own dedicated token. As a user who wants to use these 5 dApps, how is it appealing to use 5 different tokens to execute on all the things I want to do? That whole process of acquiring the tokens and interacting with the respective dApps is a massive bottleneck.

Imagine someone new to blockchain who is told that they must first buy BTC, then make an account on some crypto exchange, and buy these 5 different volatile tokens just to use 5 different dApps. Not too appealing and extremely inefficient. To the average blockchain aficionado, this process would still be agitating.

Like I said earlier, I am the furthest thing from a crypto pessimist, also I am aware of certain solutions that are trying to solve some of the problems I identified. Rather than pitch a solution I decided to keep this open-ended in order to make people think.

When we’re talking about driving “mass adoption” for these beautiful systems that use breakthroughs in cryptography and gamification, we should be thinking about the average user who just wants to use something cool and new.

How can we make this beneficial, brilliant, and easy?