Who, aside from developers, refers to the HTML or HTTP as HTML and HTTP? Who refers to modern web design as anything other than “the internet?” Radical technologies eventually become the norm and people stop thinking about them as anything other than normal. The same happened with cell phones. When cell phones first came out, they were rare novelty items that cost a lot of money. Today just about everyone has a cell phone. Nobody looks in awe or criticizes someone for having one. It’s just part of our daily lives.
Blockchain is not part of our daily lives. People still think of it as a novelty technology that has few important uses, much in the same way that people thought of cell phones, or even the internet as a whole. And yet, over time, blockchain technologies will become foundational to the internet, fintech, and our daily lives. But just like many of the other technologies that we use on a daily basis, we will become less aware of blockchain’s use. We won’t think about “using blockchain.” We’ll just think about going about our daily lives. We’ll think in terms of sending money, borrowing, purchasing houses and other properties, etc, giving little thought to the underlying blockchain elements.
Developers, tech bloggers, financial analysis, and other similar groups will be the only ones that are writing about the specifics of blockchain technology. At that point, blockchain will have reached maturity, and it will be just as important as HTTP + HTML are today, and with just as little awareness of their importance by the general population. In fact, blockchain will likely be even more important than most of us even dream of it being. I honestly don’t believe that many imagined just how crucial the internet would become for us, or just how many uses the internet would have.
How Long?
It’s hard to say how long it will take for blockchain technology to mature. While theory on blockchain has been around since the early 90s, it’s only been since 2008 that we’ve actually had a blockchain + cryptoasset pair. Yes, even Bitcoin has only been around for roughly 11 years. On the other hand, it’s been 19 years since the dot-com bubble, and the internet technolgoy in that era pales in comparison to the size of the tech industry today. Consider this CNN article, which discusses a nearly $2T loss in market value during the dot-com bubble. Sure, that’s a lot of money, but Amazon alone now has a market capitalization of nearly $1T. Google has another $780B in market capitalization. Just the FAANG stocks have a total market value greater than the entire market value lost during the dot-com bubble.
In other words, even though the internet had been around for many years, by the time the dot-com bubble hit in 2000, the internet was still largely in its infancy. While technology advances faster these days, it could easily still be another 10–20 years before blockchain technologies are fully matured. In other words, we’re in the early stages of the game, roughly equivalent to the dial-up era of the internet.
Growing Pains
There have been a number of issues with the major blockchains lately. Aside from the normal high volatility in cryptoassets, the Tron blockchain has been glitching a lot, taking a while to process activity. And the Ethereum blockchain has been having issues with gas fees. MetaMask in particular has had a weird glitch which sets the gas fee way too high.
However, before people start attacking blockchain as a failure for these issues, consider that the recent glitches in Cloudflare knocked out a good portion of the internet for a lot of people, over the course of a number of days. Even a well established technology can have issues; it’s not surprising that blockchain technology still has issues to work through.
Summary
We are in the early days of blockchain development, similar to what we saw with the internet during the dot-com bubble. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are incredible technologies that will revolutionize the way we interact with the world, the way we do business, and much more. However, it’s going to be quite some time before these technologies mature. Of course, blockchain technologies extend beyond “the internet” and so really the true mark of maturation will be when people simply refer to whatever good or service happens to utilize blockchain technology.
