A Blockchain Abstraction: Part 1

Picture this. You are forced to take a bus to work everyday and for the most part, everything goes well. You walk on the bus in the mornings, say hi to Marianne (the driver), sit in the same seat as usual, and then begin to scroll through Reddit. One day, you notice that someone else is subbing in for Marianne and after further inspection, you notice his name is Jamie. Jamie looks like he was strung out on cocaine until 4:00 AM but who are you to judge, you just want to get to work. About 10 minutes into the bus ride, you feel two large bumps. This felt unusual so you decide to gaze over at Jamie and to your astonishment, he’s trying to snort lines of cocaine. Your eyes widen in horror and your mind races with worry as you quickly glance out of the window to determine the cause of the bump. You notice that Jamie has ran over a random person and is on the way to plowing through a guard rail that separates the road from a cliff.

You’re frantic. You begin yelling desperately in an attempt to alert the other passengers of Jamie's negligence. One of the passengers sitting near the front of the bus quickly grasps the severity of the situation and decides to take action. He smacks the coke bag out of Jamie's hand and tries to gain control of the wheel. Unfortunately, the bus has just broken through the guard rail and the feeling of an impending doom has settled in. You close your eyes and one of the final thoughts that crosses your mind before the collision is

“why the fuck did I trust this guy”.

The Bankers
Like the bus driver, we initially trust the bankers. We know their not perfect but they always seem to get the job done for society. However, like we saw with Jamie, all it takes is one irresponsible (sometimes coke binging) banker to implement poorly structured fractional reserve policies and all of sudden we find ourselves in a crises. The warning signs that individuals may see in advance are irrelevant because they are either powerless to do anything about it or they have no alternative to turn towards. So, they are convinced to sit back, surrender their financial sovereignty, and let Jamie take the wheel.

The Car
When you open you’re eyes, you find yourself in a hospital bed with some broken bones and head trauma. The nurse tells you that several of the people on the bus have died and that youre lucky to be alive. You ask about Jamie and the nurse informs you that because his airbag deployed, he received no major injuries and walked away with nothing more than a couple scratches. You’re beyond furious and your vendetta against Jamie runs deep. However, after a couple days, you accept the whole thing as a freak accident and decide to move on with your life.

The whole bus incident shook you up pretty bad so you decide to buy a car. Now that you own a car, you can go wherever you want with whomever you want and whenever you want. With this newfound freedom, you find yourself going to places you’ve never gone before. Whether it’s to the mountains or a trendy coffeeshop, you can now adventure into the unknown. The only downside is all those pesky traffic rules. You’re always unsure whether you can park at some spot or not and god speed to the other drivers if they think you’re going to miss that yellow light. Sure, you’re not the best driver in the world but you’re definitely not pulling a Jamie while you’re behind the wheel.

If only there was a way to navigate through the rules without you or other people needing to constantly worry about breaking them.

Bitcoin
Like buying a car after a bus accident, Bitcoin is the reaction to the greed and irresponsibility of the coked out banker. It was the reason why Satoshi wrote a special message on Bitcoins genesis block that quoted “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. Bitcoin gave people an alternative way of controlling their own finances without needing to trust anybody. Bitcoin is the car that people decide to buy because it allows them to not only store their wealth securely, but to also transact portions of it with anyone they want and at any given time. As great as this sounds, there are still 2 major problems with this. The first is that although your funds are secure and can’t be duplicated, its extremely difficult to enforce the rules of a contract without relying on a third party intermediary. The second, and perhaps biggest problem, is the difficulty involved in using it. Sure, Roger Ver can shill his heart out, but it still dosent mean Leslie at the Walmart Supercenter is about to buy her groceries with it.

Conclusion
While its clear that the car is perhaps the best way to travel from point A to point B, it dosent mean its the easiest. A more simplistic way to do it might be something like Uber. A simple app on your phone that solves your transportation problem without you needing all the licenses, skills, and overhead associated with owning a vehicle. Maybe the same logic applies to both crypto currencies and blockchain in general.

As of now, Steemit is the closest solution ive seen to this problem. Perhaps the reason is because everyone is trying to solve the wrong problem at the moment. Its not about giving people "financial freedom" or "banking the unbanked". Its about creating a value system that's seamlessly integrated into the lives of Leslie at the supermarket, her kid at home, and Jamie post coke binge. Something thats able to transfer the digital efforts of people and translate it into real world value.

if you've made it this far through the post, you're probably wondering what exactly that solution looks like. Unfortunately, im sorry to say, that's a conversation for another day :)