Digital Wire: Digital business, digital transformation, APIs, AI and payments

I have dabbled a fair amount with all sorts of crypto currencies and their respective permissionless networks. In fact, I have been dabbling since 2012 which is by my last count a whopping 12 years. While I have always maintained that I do believe the general concept for digitization and programmability of assets is on the right path, its implementation, the user experience, the accessibility, the fraudulent activities, and the overall inefficiencies permissionless DLTs have, never made me into a true believer. I have stated that opinion on several occasions, here , here and here . There are still barriers to entry when it comes to digitization of assets: sustainable- and interoperable infrastructure. To illustrate this, I recently asked a notary public here in Zurich, why they can’t store the notarized documents as PDFs, the answer surprised me: because they must keep records for at least 70 years. Now, think about what would have happened if we stored these documents on floppy disks...

I’ve been looking at distributed ledger technology since 2012; I’ve tried to mine bitcoins and ethereum; I’ve made several bets, participated in ICOs and tried to comprehend some of the underlying mechanisms. After seven years, I figured I would summarize what I see most investors, innovators and entrepreneurs get wrong about this technology. 1.            Comparing it to the Internet (as the next big thing) The Internet was not something “new” in every sense of the word. But It linked the underlying computer base and in fact existing LAN networks together into one super wide area network. The origins are from the 60s (DARPA funded as a means for communications to survive a nuclear attack) and while crypto enthusiasts rightfully point out that it took 20 years until we saw some meaningful applications in the late 80s and finally commercialization in the mid-90s, blockchain projects are nothing like the Internet. A whole lot ...