What’s the perfect crypto killer app?

Lots of projects think they’ve got it nailed down but let’s face it:

Crypto’s killer app is still missing in action.

I’ve talked about killer apps a few times but today I’m taking it one step further. I’m going to give away a multi-million dollar business idea for free.

We’re going to walk through how you can take on big, popular business and kill them off with a crypto version that makes it utterly impossible for them to compete with you.

And you can have it up and running in six months.

Why the hell would I give that away?

Because that’s what I do.

I’ve taken open source to the business and idea level. I wake up with a new business idea every day but I don’t have the time or desire to do them all so I’m just throwing them out into the universe. I’d rather fifty teams start working on this tomorrow than one team. Competition makes the market grow stronger, faster.

So take it, run with it and retire early.

And if you get it off the ground and feel like sending me a bunch of tokens as a thank you I won’t stop you but either way I’m good.

All right. Ready? Let’s go.

Wait a minute here though. Isn’t Bitcoin the killer app already?

Some folks say that and they’re not wrong. It’s money uncontrolled by any central authority and it’s managed to survive and thrive in a hostile and chaotic environment.

But who wants to stop there?

That’s like saying we discovered fire so we’ll just call it a day.

Hey guys, we got this light bulb thing figured out but there’s absolutely nothing else we can do with electricity.

We’ve thought of everything. We’re done.

No.

We haven’t even come close to thinking of everything in crypto. We’re not close to done.

Sure there are snarky articles from doubters who say blockchain will never do a damn thing but that’s pretty short sighted. For a long time AI was considered nonsense. For decades it crashed and burned. Neural networks couldn’t win at tic tack toe, much less the insanely complicated game of Go and they certainly weren’t driving cars.

Where are those naysayers now? Confined to the dustbin of history like every other Luddite who ever lived.

History is clear. If you bet against technology it’s a losing bet.

In fact, I challenge anyone to point to a big technology that’s actually failed in the past. And don’t cheap out here. Don’t point out a single product like Virtual Boy or iteration of a technology that failed but an entire category of technology that failed.

What do I mean by that?

Game consoles are a technology category. Atari 2600 and Sony Playstation are iterations. Home video recording is a category. Betamax, VHS, DVD and DVR are iterations of that tech.

Categories matter. Iterations are just dust in the wind.

It’s super easy to find iterations of tech that failed. Dams burst. Bridges collapse. AT&T’s lines go dead. The Concorde crashes. But the platonic form of dams, bridges, phone lines and airplanes endure. And eventually someone gets the iteration right.

Lots of people tried to sell stuff online before Amazon got it right with books. VR failed for years until Oculus Rift.

The steam engine took a century of trial and error.

The first working steam pump, patented by Thomas Savery, tended to explode. Savery came up with his spin on the tech in 1698. It took another seventy years before the technology really took off with James Watt’s revolutionary design in 1765 that doubled the energy efficiency of an earlier design by James Newcomen in 1712.

And it still took eleven more years to make it to the market even after that breakthrough.

For everyone saying that crypto already had more than enough time to innovate remember we’re only eight years into this thing. Real innovation takes decades of setbacks and failures, even as the pace of human development continues to accelerate faster and faster.

We’ve gotten so caught up in having a new gadget or breakthrough every few minutes that we sometimes miss the unseen backstory that got us there.

For every breakthrough there were a million lonely hours and a million failures.

We’ve grown incredibly impatient and unrealistic, expecting miracles too soon. Technology starts off slow and steady and then explodes upwards in a wave of growth. That is the exponential curve but it’s never as fast as people think. Take this example from the brilliant article The Psychology of Money:

“IBM made a 3.5 megabyte hard drive in the 1950s. By the 1960s things were moving into a few dozen megabytes. By the 1970s, IBM’s Winchester drive held 70 megabytes. Then drives got exponentially smaller in size with more storage. A typical PC in the early 1990s held 200–500 megabytes.

And then … wham. Things exploded.

1999 — Apple’s iMac comes with a 6 gigabyte hard drive.

2003–120 gigs on the Power Mac.

2006–250 gigs on the new iMac.

2011 — first 4 terabyte hard drive.

2017–60 terabyte hard drives.

Now put it together. From 1950 to 1990 we gained 296 megabytes. From 1990 through today we gained 60 million megabytes.”

Crypto has a long way to go. It will get there but we have to have patience and perseverance.

But that doesn’t mean we have to wait for crypto to revolutionize everything to build some killer apps right now.

The more I think about this thing the more I think we’re missing some seriously obvious low hanging fruit:

Crypto Kickstarter.

So let’s get rolling.