Businesses

Confused about blockchain? You should be

Blockchain, at least in the UK, is ‘past peak’ in the Gartner Hype Cycle. Either you’re bored of hearing about its miraculous powers or you’re likely lost and confused. If you aren’t, you should be.

The blockchain ecosystem is weirdly wonderful. Filled to the brim with idealists who want to change the world and get very rich, quick while, ideally, paying no taxes in the process. The promise of bitcoin was a new global financial system free from the influence of any state. Now, holding more than $21 billion in value, everyone from Silicon Valley VCs to the Chinese middle-class have a stake. But still, nowhere is it widely used as a legal currency of note. Japan may change this, but its wealth distribution almost identically mirrors the 99 per cent to 1 per cent gross imbalance it was promised to replace.

In fact, far from freeing people from the oppression of the state, blockchains perversely promise the perfect tool for a fully auditable, tax compliant, cashless society. Similarly, the belief it is an anonymous digital cash has quickly vanished and we are now seeing a large number of analytics companies, set-up specifically to work with law enforcement agencies, to police this new parallel financial system.

The few VCs brave enough to have invested early have seen their startups fail to make returns unless they have accumulated bitcoin in some way. Its most powerful innovation has, instead, been the creation of digital scarcity, and its importance cannot be underestimated. Today this has been applied solely as a digital gold in turbulent economic times and this fundamental misunderstanding has tripped up some of the world’s smartest VCs.