“ But a closer look at the last decade reveals blockchain has thus far had a typical journey for an emerging technology on the road to maturity and adoption. A journey that’s evident in the rise of many other innovative and game-changing technologies.”

The use of these “typical journey” models are mainly marketing tools. The one that is being offered here is, well, typical.

The comparison commonly made comparison (as everyone wanting crypto and blockchain to manifest its significance does) to http/www is completely invalid. There were no questions or doubts about its usefulness and began with a use case. And there was only a pause in the money being made from new use cases that everyone understood was a limitation of network access and speed.

Compare this to Merkle Trees. The first blockchain design was patented in 1979. In the interim, there was a fairly large period of research and publication and very limited use cases. Then came “Nakamoto’s” paper and Bitcoin. 20 years later. To date, a further 10 years on from the paper, the most successful use case has been crypto-currencies. Their most successful use case, starting from the beginning, has been providing the ability to buy and sell things that are illegal. And, more recently, to launder money and speculate. And to profit from this by providing exchange services.

Granted, there has been a frenzy around finding use cases and funding them. However, where things seem to be heading is towards use cases that are fairly modest in the grand scheme of things, but not unimportant. But, even more significantly, these use cases have less to do with Satoshi Nakamoto’s dreams of decentralization and other dreams of the neo-Bookchin-ites. Instead, the usual incumbents that were to be “disintermediated” and disrupted will end up the winners. And one thing is for certain, this “change” will in no way look like previous ones, tcp-ip, open-source, http, etc. It will look more like the invention of relational databases. At best.