The more I research the popular blockchains today, I keep coming back to the principle that the point of this whole movement is decentralization. The challenge will be maintaining decentralization (social scalability) while having computational scalability. Decentralization means the blockchain will stay censorship resistant, trustless, permissionless and be able to stand the test of time.

The invention of Bitcoin has shown that the issuance of a digitally native means of exchange can be done without any trust assumptions for its issuance schedule or the balances of its participants. There are many working parts that makes this possible but the main part is Nakamoto Consensus. Most digital assets backed by a blockchain can be assigned a dollar value because they are traded on some type of cryptocurrency exchange and hence go through the price discovery process(some say this somewhat cheapens the assets by only looking at its dollar value).

Then Ethereum came along, also with the ability to issue digitally native means of exchanges as well as a public ledger of transactions. This time however, you can write any software application you can think of and deploy it to the blockchain. The implications of this are significant. Decentralized blockchains are trustless and permissionless meaning anyone, anywhere in the world can deploy a smart contract to Ethereum Mainnet and is able to start generating income from that application without having to ask for access or file any sort of documentations.

For as long as the Ethereum blockchain stays active, the user’s application can not be censored or de-platformed. Many many more verticals will arise from this but the largest of them today is the decentralized financial applications we see today that enable asset swaps and lending.