TriAg2010 said:
LatinAggie1997 said:
5. Blockchain will be the immediate and total disruptor once control is held by banks and regulatory agencies.
6. Inefficiencies will be eradicated by the tokenization of securities, property, identification, records, billing, etc.
7. The first movers, adopters and implementers, will have a huge advantage, and I think BlackRock will be positioning itself accordingly.
Addressing these specific points...
Blockchain as a fad has already come and gone. There was widespread enthusiasm and investment flowing to blockchain projects in all sorts of industries maybe five years ago. That has largely fizzled out. The trendy job postings in tech are now AI focused.
Blockchain does not provide a better mousetrap for managing lists of data than a plain old database administered by a trusted party. Securities already trade efficiently at ultra-low cost, sometimes free. Most people go years between buying and selling titled property. The inefficiencies in billing, invoicing, and record keeping are largely matters of protocol, not persistence; they're solvable problems with incumbent technology.
Kind of where I was going earlier. I went to an Innovation conference back in 2017. IBM spoke at it and at the time they shared that fully 1/3 of their R&D was devoted solely to blockchain. I wonder what that number is in 2023. I bet that percentage has been scaled back, but I don't know for sure.
In 2018, I went to a Supply Chain VC incubator event in Silicon Valley. Almost 100% of the pitches were blockchain use cases and almost all of them were geared towards the environment which might be part of the problem. I personally don't give a rat's ass about green issues for my supply chain the way these people think about it.
If everyone pitching ideas for blockchain are focused on arguably make believe problems, then that might be the reason why we haven't seen much of anything come to market (To be fair, I'm sure COVID set things back for any actual go to market ideas.) I'm all for conservation and efficiency but talk to me when you are actually addressing that with your use case and not politically driven green ideas.
The one cursory interesting use case that was presented that is still largely irrelevant to the public was one where these guys were going to use blockchain to confirm and validate where the beans in your coffee came from. In other words, they were going to be able to accurately tell you your coffee beans came from Hill 4 on Pedro's Coffee Farm in Bolivia. Again, no one really gives a damn about this outside of coffee snobs but it was at least relatable.