RE: The Path to Cryptocurrency Mass Adoption: Know Thyself
Some interesting thoughts... in a sense, I think we can learn a lot from another fairly recent game changer: The Internet, itself.
The early Internet was not a mass market thing... it was just about academia and a handful of nerds. And a handful of nerds enthusiastically pitching "The Internet is so cool!" didn't really do much for mass adoption because that pitch was seen through the eyes of nerds," and thus only was appealing to 1% of the population.
As you alluded to, most people don't really care about "blockchains," or *cryptocurrency" or even "disruptive technologies." For that matter, 90% of the population doesn't even live at the "know thyself" level of awareness.
The Internet moved towards mass adoption on the wave of "utility" and "usability."
Steve Case at AOL took care of the "Usability" end by taking the risk of creating a graphically based point-and-click web interface in an ocean of command line horrible-sequence-of-numbers-and-letters world... and then "sold" email as a way to instantly send a letter to Aunt Martha in Topeka, without any mention of technology. And that made AOL the "600lb gorilla" of the early web.
"Utility" came along when the "commercial" web was born. In the beginning, it was all information and communication, but nobody was really making money from their activities. The sheer scale of today's web owes a LOT of its size to the simply phrase "I can find that and buy it online!" Suddenly... a reason for both providers and consumers to mass adopt this new vehicle.
So... now we have cryptos and blockchains. Are they easy to use? And what can I DO with them? A few months back, there was an announcement from Coinstar that you'd soon be able to start buying Bitcoin at their 1000s of green change machines at grocery stores... brilliant ease-of-access move! Your average Joe Blow in the street totally knows what a Coinstar machine is. Low utility, though... we still haven't addressed the "what can I do with Bitcoin?" question, as it applies to the average person who has never heard of Deepak Chopra or self-awareness. As you said, most of the population lives on the bottom 2-3 rungs of Mr. Maslow's pyramid... but the idea of "doing good" is not beyond their grasp.
Let's face it, a lot of those folks volunteer at the local animal shelter or do various types of community service, too... and yes, they are into gaming and entertainment. So the challenge becomes to meet people at the level they are and somehow leveraging that entry point into also raising self-awareness.
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While you're right, you're also only right as far as you go. By far, most of the value of the internet remains in the exchange of information, even today. By information I mean, of course, Pr0n. It was teenage nerds discovering free pr0n that blew the internet up, and it's hard to even compare any other form of use in terms of bandwidth now. It's also very hard to define. Is Instagram mostly pr0n, or mostly not?
Sure it's become far more possible to buy stuff online, but in terms of data flow, sheer bandwidth, I don't think any other market approaches pr0n today. If you have metrics that discuss this, I'd be interested in seeing them. I note black markets today remain an unacknowleded but penultimate percentage of all commerce. Traditional economics often fail to even consider such markets, but in reality coke was probably the second largest market in Fla. in the '90s, right after government (much of which was also dependent on coke, insofar as it was dedicated to law enforcement).
It's difficult to quantify for several reasons, and not only because of self-reporting flaws due to social matters. Pr0n is highly subsidized for purposes that are very unclear, as it has huge but unknown value to certain parties as means of creating social control, for example. It's impact is far larger than even the immense amount of money generated or expended on it.
Thanks!
Whereas I totally agree that pr0n accounts for the vast majority of Internet usage, I'd still submit that the whole online pr0n world would be a shadow of what it has become, were it not for the attached income opportunity. And so, it's ultimately about the commercial angle.
Now if we're getting into trying to measure the Dark Web (anything requiring a TOR browser) then I'm getting out of the speculation business.
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