Through the myriad blogs, posts and tweets we are fed a daily dose of ideas and prophecies relating to Blockchain Technology. Throughout time during periods of major technological breakthrough history is peppered with scepticism, mistrust, and misconception fuelled in no small way by the, at times, fantastical prophecies that tend to accompany new technologies.
People throughout time have been amused by breakthrough technology related prophecies that led imaginative people to postulate on matters that included Flying cars, time travel, and teleportation to name just a few.
As new technologies have emerged in their new ‘raw’ states, humans have not always been quick to grasp their significance. Fledgling technologies that had seemingly frivolous or limited uses subsequently, through vision and development, have blossomed to become technologies that the world would find difficult to live without today. For example, when Physicist Percy Spencer accidentally melted a chocolate bar in his pocket whilst working on magnetrons his vision led him to develop microwave ovens. Whilst the microwave oven is unquestionably pivotal in terms of human evolution today microwaves enable wireless communication, guide aircraft through the skies, and can establish the pinpoint location of just about anything on the planet.
In 1951 Norman Woodland invented the Barcode. The idea was shelved for around twenty years as it was considered unworkable, financially unviable, and in any event of little general use. The list of technological ‘near misses’ is almost endless.
As a species we are good at dismissing or belittling technological advancements, particularly those we do not fully understand. Instead we tend to leave the development of ground-breaking ideas to the thick-skinned visionary few for them to serve up in user friendly packaging.
This is where we are at today with Blockchain technology. Blockchain at its deepest level will provide the web-based world with a secure, transparent, and trustworthy means of conducting business, storing data, making payments, and recording provenance related data (the list of uses is almost endless). Blockchain is set to revolutionise the way global information is treated and processed. We just have not made it sufficiently mainstream for general acceptance and up-take. Yet!
At Chainlify we are working to help change this. Our Blockchain as a Service Platform will streamline and simplify Developer workloads enormously. It will lower the entry level skill/experience level needed by software engineers. This will allow them to access and produce Blockchain projects speedily and without the need for a lengthy and costly learning process. It will enable software engineers to develop their individual skill sets whilst working (earning) on live projects.
This will allow for the exponential growth in the number of developers able to work in Blockchain and lead to a corresponding growth in Blockchain based projects. When this happens Blockchain will become mainstream and quickly establish itself as the new ‘norm’.
Perhaps the answer to the question posed in the title will turn out to be subjective dependant upon its uses and users. Why not? In nature we see many different types of birds, all built differently in order to achieve different purposes but all, at a basic level, are still birds.
Note: The picture that accompanies this article relates to the recent successful teleportation of Data carried out at Delft University in the Netherlands.