To make sense of this phenomenon, you’re forced to one of two possible conclusions.
The first is that the value of crypto is entirely in speculation.
There’s a lot of unfounded speculation in cryptocurrency markets, no doubt.
Many of my close friends think cryptocurrencies are entirely a bubble.
This kind of skepticism is a healthy perspective in a frothy market, but I’d say this is too broad a claim.
The other possibility is that crypto’s underlying value is in something other than the user experience.
But this seems to belie everything we know about how technological value creation takes place.
The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, argues that crypto won’t have a killer app at all: … There will be no “killer app” for blockchain technology.
The reason for this is simple: the doctrine of low-hanging fruit.
If there existed some particular application for which blockchain technology is massively superior to anything else … then people would be loudly talking about it already.
… And so far, there has been no single application that anyone has come up with that has seriously stood out to dominate everything else on the horizon.
” Vitalik Buterin (The Value of Blockchain Technology) Vitalik repudiates the “killer app” framework.
He believes that blockchain will become valuable for the many long-tail applications that it enables.
I disagree.
I think the “killer app” framework is the correct one.
While there are many cutting-edge applications that technologists will find exciting (myself included), the major drivers of blockchain’s value are relatively narrow.
Amidst the hype-train of ICOs, “decentralizing the Internet,” and bullshit artists trying to hoist everything they can think of onto a blockchain, it’s instructive to take the 1000-foot view and remind ourselves of the big picture.
I argue there are four killer apps for blockchains: Dark web and black market payments Digital gold Payments (macro and micro) Tokenization Go to the full article Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)MoreClick to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window).