RE: Entrepreneurship doesn't always start with a good idea. Sometimes it comes from frustration
Congratulations @verengai.
I love this kind of innovation - the kind that's borne from an insatiable obsession to make things better.
There’s a fine line between frustration and the kind of rebellion that resembles teenage angst and manifests a futile rebellion.
The hard part is realising that the best way to change that future is to build it.
Technically, it’s easier than ever to fix things thanks to distributed technologies / blockchain / internet / access to information.
But it’s hard to stand up, as you are, and actually build the alternative.
The tricky part is bridging the gap from the status quo today to the utopian view of tomorrow, or 2020, or some other point in the future.
Here’s how innovation really works
The most innovative companies / movements start by studying the problem rather than the solution. You ruminate on the problem - interrogating and questioning until you understand its root cause and then solve for that.
Once you understand the problem deeply enough, you realise that everything else is just a symptom.
A deep solution makes all the other problems go away.
Bitcoin is the perfect example. The root problem is that there was no trust protocol that allows us to transact globally, without restriction.
There was a disconnect between the distributed nature of the internet, and the centralised systems of banking and its regulation.
By creating a decentralised trust protocol, Bitcoin transcends all the other problems all the other problems become irrelevant.
Things like hyperinflation (pertinent in Zimbabwe), transaction costs, antique national banking regulations, fractional reserve banking, derivatives markets can effectively become obsolete.
It just takes a while to iterate and move up the adoption curve.
Even when you prove that there’s a better way of doing things, you’ll be fighting the resistance from the luddites who want to preserve the status quo.
Corruption is a difficult one to transcend and I’m not going to pretend to understand what’s happening in Zimbabwe.
But this is an awesome story and I can't wait to see where you take things.
Just keep doing great things.
I once heard Paul Snow give an interesting thought experiment. He said: "Think about the most dishonest person in the world you can think of. Now, do you think they want to live in an honest world?". What he was saying was that, at the end of the day, even the most dishonest people in the work and the most corrupt politicians still want those around them to be honest with them and if they can, they would want to enforce this honesty. This is how, I think technologies like bitcoin stand a chance. Even in the most corrupt places in the world
Ah. Interesting perspective. It's good to examine the extremes, and plan for that in the model too.
It makes me think about Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility, where systems are beyond robust in that they gain from disorder and chaos, and don't just resist it. Evolution by natural selection is one such example.
And now that I think about it, Bitcoin might be antifragile too. It doesn't reward dishonesty, therefore it disincentivises corruption. And by removing the bureaucracy around txns, the market forces out corruption.
This is only a semi-formed idea in my head and I might return to it later. Just planting seeds because I appreciate the discussion =)
@marc-e thanks for the comment, very interesting insights you pose here. I wish we had more people seeing the the world such in lenses.