Bitcoin is in a massive speculative bubble, with $95 billion in supposed value that belies the cold reality that all that crypto-green is actually not worth the paper it’s printed on – if there even were paper, which there isn’t. As Steve Forbes says, “you don’t even get a tulip for your speculation.”
And then there’s the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) market – or as I like to call it, ‘scammers paradise.’ What do you get when you combine the madness of crowds, global criminal enterprise, and a dearth of regulation? More illicit ‘wealth’ than even Pablo Escobar could bury in the mountains of Venezuela, that’s what.
And then there’s blockchain, the technology at the heart of all this craziness – or to be more precise, a family of distributed ledger technologies which may or may not technically be blockchain, depending on how you define it (I’ll use ‘blockchain’ in this article broadly to cover all such efforts).
Given I’m on the record as a blockchain skeptic, you might think I’m equally bearish on this technology. However, you’d be wrong. In spite of all the greater fool froth around Bitcoin and ICOs, blockchain actually has some real promise. I even recently wrote a positive article on a blockchain-based company.
Nevertheless, if you look at all the blockchain startups clamoring for attention, go to all the blockchain conferences springing up like weeds, and talk to any of the ‘blockchain experts’ stampeding through LinkedIn, you may be left with the distinct impression that blockchain is also little more than the product of the same irrational exuberance that will inevitably deflate as quickly as a popped balloon – and you, too, won’t even end up with a tulip for your troubles.
The question of the hour, therefore, for the three main blockchain constituencies – vendors, investors, and customers – is how to tell the viable blockchain efforts from the scammers and pretenders.
Even more critical: once you’ve chosen your favored blockchain horse to ride, how do you keep it from becoming the inevitable collateral damage when Bitcoin takes its nosedive and the Federales shut down ICOs?
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/10/28/navigating-past-blockchains-irrational-exuberance/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Liz West.
