I spent some time today on the new usv.com. We launched it on New Year’s Day and then pushed another rev of it last week. It’s pretty damn good, if I must say so myself.
Anyway, I read two posts back to back. Joi Ito’s post comparing the early days of the Internet to the early days of the Blockchain. And William and David Cohen’s post on The Trust Web.
Joi makes the point that interoperable email was the first killer app of the Internet and that Bitcoin is likely to the be the first killer app for the Blockchain. He talks about how we were able to send email on the proprietary online services like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL, but only to other users of those services. And then these services implemented connections to Internet email and all of a sudden we could talk to anyone. I remember that moment vividly. It was one of the many “aha moments” that I had in the mid 90s that led me to leave Euclid and start Flatiron with Jerry. I could see that something important was afoot and I needed to get in on it.
William and David talk in their post about SMS based banking and payment services in the developing world:
To peer into the future of decentralized banking for the masses, look no further than the success of easypaisa in Pakistan and M-Pesa in Kenya
It seems to me that easypaisa and M-Pesa are the equivalents to Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL. They are the proprietary closed networks that deliver on much of the value of Bitcoin but are not open and interconnected to everything else. Their very existence, however, is the tell that we are on the cusp of something similar that is open, global, and interconnected. I know that people are working to connect easypaisa and M-Pesa to Bitcoin and the Blockchain. That’s an obvious but important step to get to “decentralized banking for the masses” as William and David call it.
As Mark Twain supposedly said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” I’m banking on that to be true.
