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In my 2019 tech predictions column for Newsroom, I had this to say about crypto and blockchain: This time last year, I was predicting continued growth for crypto and blockchain. How wrong I was on that. So I’m naturally more circumspect now about the chances of cryptocurrencies and blockchain making an impact in 2019. What…
Read More My hopes for crypto in 2019
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I just posted my annual top 5 technology trends post on my personal blog. One of my key trends was the crypto crash of 2019 and the stalling of blockchain innovation. As you all know, it’s been stormy weather these past few months. What I wrote sums up my feelings about cryptocurrencies and blockchain as…
Read More Crypto community: time to focus on product, not price
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I’m currently following a bunch of cryptocurrency startups hoping to disrupt the media business. I’ve already written about a few of them: Civil, Narrative and Po.et. There are also a number of social media products built on blockchain, such as Steemit (a crypto Reddit) and Peepeth (a crypto Twitter). Finally, there are as-yet unlaunched crypto media projects…
Read More 5 ways crypto is disrupting media
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Love or hate blockchain and cryptocurrencies, you can’t deny they’ve made a big impact on the Web’s evolution over the past several years. I don’t necessarily believe there are “versions” of the Web, but I’m going to appropriate the term Web 3.0 anyway. Mainly because it helps try and identify what’s changed on the Web;…
Read More Defining Web 3.0 (aka making sense of blockchain)
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I’ve been thinking about some of the problems of blockchain startups and what (if anything) can be done to address them. The fact is, this “Web 3” revolution has been very slow to get going. I had expected it to ramp up faster, but instead the industry is still overly focused on cryptocurrency speculation and…
Read More 3 problems the blockchain industry must fix
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It’s been an ongoing bear market for cryptocurrencies in 2018, including for the top two coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum. The main causes of bear sentiment seem to be worldwide regulation issues and other concerns around legitimisation (for example the blanket ban on crypto ads by Facebook, Google and Twitter). But another factor is the continuing…
Read More The misty realm of Ethereum scaling solutions
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Interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency continues to surge, which makes comparisons to the mid-to-late 1990s all the more relevant. That was a period when we were all trying to figure out how to use the Web – or “surf” it, using the lingo of that time. We’re at a similar point with blockchain. I call…
Read More We’re in the Geocities era of blockchain
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In part 3 of our ongoing series about blockchain infrastructure trends, we’ll focus on storage. In particular, how one ICO aims to be the blockchain equivalent of Amazon’s giant cloud storage platform, S3. Let’s firstly put this in context. A major part of the appeal of blockchain is that it will enable decentralized apps. The example I…
Read More Filecoin: Amazon S3 for Web 3
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I’m writing a series of posts about blockchain infrastructure, and in particular how it impacts on blockchain and crypto startups. In Part 1, I discussed blockchain size and the key differences between Bitcoin’s blockchain and Ethereum’s. I concluded that blockchain size doesn’t have a significant impact on startups; it’s only relevant to miners and others who…
Read More Blockchain speeds & the scalability debate
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My goal with Blocksplain is to track blockchain and cryptocurrency startups, which some are calling “Web 3” companies, and explain how they fit into the emerging blockchain ecosystem. But in order to understand the potential value of these startups, we first need to understand how the ecosystem itself is progressing. That’s my aim in this series…
Read More Does blockchain size matter?