In this week’s “Penning Down The Thoughts” series, Jimmie is taking the Pen team (and the readers), to the origins of the combustion engine. It sounds a bit dramatic, and you might wonder what the h*** does combustion engine have to do with blockchain technology and crypto? Well keep reading, and you might get enlightened.
THE ORIGIN OF TECHNOLOGY
All technologies start as interesting ideas, and some of them begin to develop into innovations. We know that the arc from invention to innovation takes a lot of time, and takes a lot of work. Some of those innovations eventually become commercially viable. A case example is the automobile. In the early days, cars looked like a pretty lousy idea and were poorly executed. Early on, there were electric cars, there were battery-operated cars. The combustion engine was a relative latecomer. It took Henry Ford's mass production to create the standards, of what a car looked like, what parts it needed, and how it operated. That's when complementary assets and infrastructure emerged. So you have paved roads and petrol stations. Then you have secondary things like motels and restaurants, and places to eat while you're on the highway and buy food.
Furthermore, interesting questions like what side of the road should we drive on what will the speed limit be, do we need any safety, or what age can you drive a car. That's all regulation, but they can´t (or won't enter the space) before the playground is built, exactly what we're experiencing with crypto & blockchain space, but back to cars. An entire ecosystem had been built, but it wasn't a smooth transition by any means. The imagery here is there are maybe a couple of hundred, three, or four hundred companies that tried to get into this space. But they're not car companies. They're bicycle manufacturers or steam engine, manufacturers. At some point, in this account, all that period of ferment settles around a dominant design, and then you have what, again, what innovation economists would call a shakeout. They would say you go from 300 or 400 producers, all of them vying to shape this emerging space, this emerging thing called the automobile. You may then drop to 20 or 30 manufacturers. And then you may drop to 5 or 6. It took 50 years for cars to go from curious inventions to finally tuned, mass-market products and 50 years to change the world as we knew it.
TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE
But why are we talking about the evolution of the car industry? My point is we all today know cars, we use them every day. Many, especially the male part of our race love to see cars, drive cars and talk about cars. but most of us don’t know how to change a simple light bole in a car or change a battery. It’s not important to know everything about everything if the goal is user-friendly mass adoption. 50 years ago a car wasn’t a simple thing to drive. the same with blockchain and crypto assets.10-12 years ago it was almost impossible to use bitcoin because no one knew about it, and there were no businesses and services around it. today just 12 years later, blockchain, web3, and crypto assets are the most invested tech space in the world, ATH investment year after year, millions already own crypto and tens of thousands of companies are building on the blockchain. DEFI space has a 50 % increase every year, and every day comes new opportunities true new tokens, new services, and new markets. It’s time to take place in the driver’s seat and see where the trip takes us.
And it’s not banks, financial institutions, governments, and Wall Street that are building the new economic ecosystem. It’s the nerds, the gamers. small startups that can see problems that need to be solved. It´s innovations. We need exchanges, swap services, custodians, wallet providers, and S-node hosting platforms, we need bridges between the different blockchains and layers. But we also need government helps to set the right playground and fundamental legal structure to build the next and 4th revolution.
"Penning down the thoughts” is a series compiled by the CEO and Co-Founder of Penning, Jimmie Hansen Steinbeck. A compilation of his vast experience, knowledge, failures, successes, know-how & ideas. Jimmie has spent the last decade (almost since the birth of bitcoin), working in the crypto, blockchain (also known as Web3) space, as an investor, entrepreneur, and expert advisor to numerous crypto companies.