Well said. And if this space is going to be as big as many of us think, then there should be room for more than one company/community, right?
Hundreds of competitors from all sectors. Blockchain technology is basically a new database primitive. Any application that requires access to a trusted database could use blockchains in one way or another, which basically means the entire internet.
I think the most rapid area of innovation will be with systems that are data light, but trust rich. For example, digital identity management systems where one wants to put identity, reputation, and metadata on blockchain. Voting systems where you care about integrity, absolute transparency, non-repudiability, and rapid scaling. Contractual relationships that can now be modularized and made dynamic by both being connected to the instruments of value and trusted data feeds. And asset registry like land, art, collectible property, etc.
None of these things are in the big data domain of petabytes, but require a person to trust a third party to maintain the system and preserve the integrity of the underlying data.
Systems like trading, clearing and settlements, etc are a mixed bag in my opinion. When you're dealing with physical assets, you can't outsource trust to an algorithm. I have to deliver your gold. Furthermore, blockchain systems are prohibitively expensive to attempt to replicate the NYSE with the rapid, data intensive pace of trading. Rather, I think we'll see a hybrid structure where exchanges still exist, but have provable reserves, better user authentication, and standardized ACTUS like financial contracts that are smart while retaining a pseudo-centralized design. I think Chris Odom has the best insight in this respect with Open Transactions.
Perhaps the biggest long term area of innovation will be with internet infrastructure. Currently, we have a fragile, bottlenecked and highly backdoored internet with rather dumb routing. Stanford and others have proposed things like software defined networking via the clean slate initiative; however, the cost of replacing traditional backbone hardware would be astronomical thus things tend to upgrade very slowly. Look how long IPv6 and DNSSec are taking. This said, cryptocurrencies enable a completely new internet that has an incentive layer built in for routing, storage and computation.
We can tokenize the internet and instead of relying upon a massive server farm, one can have a distributive mesh of home PCs, cell phones, tablets, and other devices building a smarter, faster and more reliable second internet that also has strong cryptographic primitives built in making it totally dark from the NSA's perspective. Probably going to take a few years, but economics should drive this progress.
depends on the definition of community .. if you think about PTS/AGS social consensus ... you might not think of spliting that community ..
though you might see different communities when it comes to tech on the chain .. especially once we see turing complete scripting and vote-able hardforks ..
One of the things I never imagined when Stan and I came up with protoshares (originally called IPOCoin for you history buffs) was how deep the notion of incumbancy value drives this space. Bitcoin is old, poorly scales, and suffers from a horrific monkey patched codebase alongside a bizarre upgrade path, yet the community clings to it like some sort of holy book. I believe it's mostly economic self-interest where the community cares mostly about the token value instead of the particulars of the technology.
One of the things Invictus should be commended for is its continued research of how to perform effective sharedropping and using this mechanism to move its community into new ideas. The economics aren't well studied, but its clear if you protect incumbent value, then you'll likely have a lot less resistance to innovation. The down side is that when one detects problems with the existing social contract that lead to things like tragedy of the commons or unfair advantage to certain adopters there is obviously going to be pushback when trying to change it.
I'm saying they can succeed in different spaces without usurping each others' niches. But maybe they'll all be greedy and do so anyway. Our community comes with the social consensus; anyone using this technology must honor that or they don't get us.
I don't think this is an absolute condition. What if you get 50 percent of what you had before because the distribution is shared with another community- kind of like a merger? There isn't an established corpus of research to suggest consumer behavior and thus its speculation connected to isolated events. I think over time we'll all get a better notion of what can be done and what can't via many experiments and failures.