Congratulations! You Made it to the Third Generation of Blockchain Technology!
Congratulations, you made it!
You've lived thru 2 generations of blockchain technology already!
You should be going to Bingo night, watching TV all day and have a beard like Gandalf the White by now.
All joking aside, this is one of the most exciting times to be a human being.
Many are saying that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will go down in history as one of the major milestone achievements of the human race - on par with the discovery of electricity and the internet.
And you have a front row seat!
But how did we get here?
Swaths of new users are flooding the cryptocurrency market, making it all the more exciting but also exposing many of the flaws in the space and with the technology.
Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, and one of the key players in the Ethereum project puts it succinctly in a recent talk he gave for G20 Ventures just outside the Harvard campus.
“We have a scalability problem where we have billions of users that are coming in and we don’t know how to handle them and CryptoKitties is killing us. We have an interoperability problem in the ecosystem where we have thousands of cryptocurrencies and they’re all just not talking to each other well. And we have a sustainability problem where basically you can’t figure out how to pay for things without these damn ICO’s. ”
Right on, Charles.
But how does this prove that we are in the third generation of blockchain technology?
Well, first it makes sense to look at history for examples of similar situations.
Margaret Rouse, tech writer and director of WhatIs.com, explains how the same phenomenon took place with cellular technology:
“The first generation (1G) began in the early 80's with the commercial deployment of Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) cellular networks. Early AMPS networks used Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (FDMA) to carry analog voice over channels in the 800 MHz frequency band.
The second generation (2G) emerged in the 90's when mobile operators deployed two competing digital voice standards. In North America, some operators adopted IS-95, which used Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) to multiplex up to 64 calls per channel in the 800 MHz band. Across the world, many operators adopted the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) standard, which used Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) to multiplex up to 8 calls per channel in the 900 and 1800 MHz bands.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) defined the third generation (3G) of mobile telephony standards IMT-2000 to facilitate growth, increase bandwidth, and support more diverse applications. For example, GSM could deliver not only voice, but also circuit-switched data at speeds up to 14.4 Kbps. But to support mobile multimedia applications, 3G had to deliver packet-switched data with better spectral efficiency, at far greater speeds.”
It’s clear that as the technology became more popular and useful to people, the demand on the technology forced companies to make giant strides in their technological development.
“...get from 2G to 3G, mobile operators had make "evolutionary" upgrades to existing networks while simultaneously planning their "revolutionary" new mobile broadband networks. This lead to the establishment of two distinct 3G families: 3GPP and 3GPP2.”
This same pattern is now happening with blockchain technology.
While telecommunications companies were incentivized to hire credentialed technologists who knew what they were doing so that a product didn’t flop, those same incentives don’t exist in the space today.
“We inadvertently created a Rube Goldberg machine with Ethereum for venture capital...basically you just issue a token, like an ERC20 token, you go and do a ‘crowd sale’, whatever that means, and you raise a bunch of money and now you have a bunch of money. You can go spend it and it’s a donation so there are no strings attached.” States Charles Hoskinson, alluding to the volatility of the market and how ICO’s are capable of raising tens of millions of dollars out of seemingly thin air.
“Whenever you have problems that are indicative of your size, scope, and scale….problems that occur as a consequence of success, that’s a good symptom that you have a new generation coming”
When Charles founded IOHK, a tech company who’s founding principle is “cascading disruption”, it was clear to him what the problems in the space were - and how to solve them.
After working on Ethereum directly with co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Charles was able to go off and start his own company and do things the way he wanted.
“I’m kind of an academic, I studied mathematics, I like analytic number theory, so I said ‘Ya know, there’s a deficit in our space with respect to rigor.’ There’s both a peer-review and academic deficit and there is an engineering deficit”
This is one of the founding principles of Charles’ brain child, Cardano.
Cardano promises to be the third generation of blockchain technology and it has planted its flag firmly in the soil of academia and the peer review process.
Here is what Cardano’s bedroom would look like if it was a human.
Cardano has committed itself to this labor-intensive peer-review process to create a third generation blockchain that can stand up to the most rigorous academic scrutiny.
This stands in stark contrast to the other blockchain technologies that are in the space today.
“We have a lot of people writing papers and those papers are not really rigourously checked by people who should be reading them. And these papers are playing with not simple things. They’re playing with cryptography, with programming language theory, theyre playing with game theory...all kinds of things that people spend a lifetime studying and rigorously reviewing”
Cardano has pledged to commit each line of code to an academicly rigorous peer-review process in pursuit of a vision of the next generation of blockchain technology.
Buckle up and take out your dentures, it’s gonna be a wild (but academically proven to be safe) ride to the future.