Unblocked

Chapter 5. TORTOISE OR HARE?

Everything changes and nothing stands still.

Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535 BC–475 BC)

How Far Along Are We?

It’s still achingly early.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 whitepaper was ignored by all but a fringe group of cypherpunks for a handful of years. They were joined by a group of particularly visionary entrepreneurs a few years later. Then, the idea catapulted into broader public awareness in 2017 with blustery media attention to bitcoin’s stratospheric ascent. Fast-forward to today: this single whitepaper spawned a massive global computer network with over 10,000 nodes and a vast ecosystem of developers, users, and companies around the globe in a few short years. Now, thousands of companies (both new and established players) are looking to build businesses or experimenting with blockchains in parts of their business.

But what they are building today is often clunky, ugly, and frustrating, and it doesn’t scale well. In a recent New York Times article, journalist Nathaniel Popper warned, “Few blockchains have been used and battle-tested in the real world for any amount of time, which leaves significant questions about how they will perform once they make it into use.”³⁵ Right now, blockchains are also painfully slow. Of course, this was how the web looked back in 1994—and a YouTube launched back then would have failed. As with anything so new, we first need brave pioneers to build infrastructure, increase speed, battle-test innovations, experiment ...