The year 2017 brought a lot of attention to the Blockchain as the surging price of Bitcoin made a lot of Headlines. People who had no idea of what Blockchain or Bitcoin is became acutely fixated on it and seeked ways by which they can get their own share of the Decentralization Pie
There are still however a lot of bumps on the road to mainstream adoption of the Blockchain. The most popular controversy surrounding the Blockchain is the claim by the Government and certain Individuals that Bitcoin is a bubble that will stillburst and leave everyone who adopted it in tears
While I don't believe this is true, I believe that the Blockchain has some things in common and that is a bumpy road to adoption
If you look back in time you will find out that the Internet which we have come to depend on everyday was once fought by the same Government and some certain highly placed Individuals.
Suppression and Taxation was the order of the day in the 90's when the Internet was trying to gain traction. Even banks refused to support Internet Payments, those who wanted to make online payments, had to make use of Gateways
When it comes to the bubble issue, the reason why the Internet suffered a crash was simply because the pace of adoption did not match the pace of development.
There was no early structrues put in place to ensure that there will be a wide spread of adoption, there were a lot of websites with very few people visiting them
Bitcoin on the other hand have a lot of daily transactions. A sneak peek into Blocktivity.info will reveal that the top three most active Blockchains has an average combined total of 3,152,443 transactions
Developmental Stages
There are various stages of adoption or acceptance new technologies have to go through before they can boast of mainstream adoption. There is the early stage of using it to execute old process in a new way. This stage does not imply real development
At the next stage, the technology is used to build new forms of Infrastructure that did not exist previously, this leads to a transformation of how things are done.Just like the Internet birthed new forms of programming languages like java to help build Infrastructure which was a long shot from it's early days of being a content publishing platform
Java and other languages made the creation of online utilities possible, utilities that never existed prior to the Internet.
The Blockchain may seem strange and out of place to some at the moment but with futher development people who despise it will have no choice but to use it.
Just like the Internet, we will wonder how we were able to survive without It. People who were born after the Internet achieved mainstream adoption, grew up to see it as something normal, they have no idea of the amount of work that went into it's adoption
When it comes to Blockchain adoption I also believe that education has a huge role to play. In the road to decentralization, ignorance are like Road Blocks that makes the journey slow and the faster we get rid of the road blocks the more easier the journey will be
Thanks For Reading
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Great article, very relevant points @ogochukwu!
We going to blockchain tecnology. It's true.
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Blockchain technology is really taking over
My nigerian brother
Spot on, I agree with the phases of development you've outlined, I'm also a believer in Blockchain technology, a lot of battles are being fought against it we should keep fighting back like this and hope to win and hope victory doesn't also take long 😀