Infrastructure Inversion by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

The concept of Infrastructure Inversion is used when a new technology must first use the old infrastructure, and how that creates a conflict and pressure that can lead to an infrastructure inversion. When a new technology is introduced, many are quick to say, "See it's not working, it's slow, or it doesn't work as well." This is not new. This happens every time you have a new technology that is disruptive; in its first few years of its adoption it has to be carried by the existing technology that it is disrupting.

When you introduce a disruptive technology, you meet resistance. Resistance is the first reaction. The ones who succeed are the ones who continue-even though the rest of society tells them they're crazy. In the beginning, the disruptive technology has to live in a world created for the technology it's replacing.

Infrastructure inversion is when you start with the new technology living on the old infrastructure and then, it flips. You build infrastructure and then the old infrastructure rides on top, on the infrastructure designed for the new technology. We now have Bitcoin- a decentralized trust platform that can do settlement of transactions on a global basis without intermediaries. But we are still living in the old system. Today, we have to use exchanges tied to traditional bank accounts, or use IBAN transfers or credit cards.

The banks point to this and say, "It's not working. Look, you have to all of the regulation that we have to do. You have to do all the identity that we have to do. You have to slow everything down to the speed of traditional banking." But what we do have is a new technology that has within it the promise of a thousand other applications they haven't yet imagined. First the banks will resist. Then, the banks will adopt. The banks will run their systems alongside blockchain and bitcoin systems, and finally they will run all of traditional banking as an application on top of a decentralized trusted ledger.

The infrastructure inversion will allow us to comfortably run traditional banking applications on top of a distributed global ledger- an open blockchain like bitcoin, the door for other applications, for applications we've never seen before. What we're part of now is the very early stages as we look at the future of money, and the 1st stages of the greatest infrastructure inversion the world has ever seen.