In this post I discuss some of the more distant and speculative outcomes that the crypto currency revolution could produce for us.

It is nothing short of a cliche to say that we live in a fast paced world. People often note that progress seems to be accelerating, but how much can progress keep on accelerating for?

Before 2009 the rate of new digital currencies coming out was less than one per year, now in 2016 it's more than one a month. It's fair to say that the cypto-currency world is having its Cambrian Explosion moment.

With so much change going on, predicting who will be the winners and losers in the race for adoption is close to impossible. However, there are some useful ways to look at how technologies get phased in and out over time which may give us some clues.

The longevity of technologies

Anyone with half and interest in tech and tech products will be familiar with the technology adoption lifecycle. The phrase 'early adopter' is used in everyday conversations today. Predicting adoption curves and measuring adoption rates is great for assessing the ultimate potential of a technology, but not so great for assessing its longevity.

Longevity is a slightly alien concept on the world where we are so used to technology being constantly updated, upgraded and superseded. We forget that there were times before the birth of planned obsolescence where the state of art in technology evolved much more slowly.

Having said that, we have some very good examples of technology which we use in our everyday lives which is actually 'old' in internet terms.

TCP/IP

The underlying network protocol of the internet and most networks came into existence some time in the early 1970's, and was based upon research done by DARPA in the late 1960's. This means TCP/IP is over 40 years old.

HTTP

HTTP version 1.0, the protocol which your web browser uses to download web pages and submit forms, came into existence in 1996 making HTTP 20 years old.

This may seem surprising but this level of longevity implies two things:

• These protocols would be a difficult to swap out
• These protocols are 'good enough' for an internet to work; and no other protocol has come along in their place which offers anything better enough that would offset the cost of everyone switching over to it.

So it's not that TCP/IP and HTTP are perfect and there aren't better protocols, it's just that we're unlikely to change them any time soon.

Expanding that idea out further, it seems that there is little known and discussed phenomena which applies to anything from wine glasses to chairs to books. This phenomena was popularised by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan and Antifragile but was formally coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. It's called the Lindy Effect and to give Nassim Taleb's description:

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “ageing” like persons, but “ageing” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

This is quite counterintuitive but help us further explain why even some technologies hang around for decades.

The can societies keep up with the rate of technological change?

Something quite astonishing is taking place before our eyes. Within less than a single generation, the internet has changed the way the world works, so much so we've only just begun to see the unexpected consequences of such a major change emerge.

We've adapted quite well to the gigantic change in how we get and share information, but will the changes in how we transact value be so easy adapt to? Is Bitcoin a return to a simpler way of holding and transacting value, albeit in a globally networked context?

Or are the consequences of global, immutable, decentralised digital ledgers far more reaching and disruptive than that? Give the potential for crypto currencies and smart contracts to upend banking, financial services, public services, law, taxation, governance and so on, will it be ourselves and our existing institutions which become the barrier to change?

Closing thoughts

In part one, I've discussed two viewpoints which shine light on the limits of technology adoption and how this might help us make some predictions about how the crypto currency revolution will pan out.

In part two, I'll discuss in more detail some of the visionary ideas promised by crypto-currency technology and ask will they really happen? Or will they happen in the way we think?

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Also, check out my last article on Freedom here https://steemit.com/philosophy/@kbishop/what-is-freedom-in-the-21st-century

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Image source: Wikipedia

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