A shot in the arm

A week or two ago, we took our daughter to the doctor and she had to have a blood test taken. She has had a few in her life, as have I, but it is never really an enjoyable experience for anyone involved. In the waiting room there was a glass case that had test tubes filled with old IV needles in it - they were horribly thick.

I don't know if they are a great thing to display before people go in for tests, but they reminded me of a few years ago when I noticed that the tests and were far less painful. After the second or third time, I asked the nurse if they had changed the needles and she was surprised, because they had and while she knew they were meant to be sharper, I was the first that had commented on it. What I found interesting though was that while the difference was massive for me (I don't like needles but get dozens a year) the nurse didn't know if it had made a difference or not until I mentioned it, they had never asked anyone before.

This is the case, as incremental changes and for them, they have probably seen many such minor changes over their career, with most not having much of a noticeable impact at all. However, all of these small changes add up into very large impacts on the future when looking back, yet are often taken for granted in the moment.

I think that this is the same with crypto at the moment, where there are so many things happening all of the time that not only can no individual be aware of or understand them all, but they might not notice the effects that they have, much like the analogy frog in slowly warming water. But at some point, the impacts have completely shifted the way in which we live our lives.

I was talking about this with a friend today and used the example of the development of the car phone, to bag phone, to mobile, to smartphone.

The earliest version of a mobile phone was first created in 1946, evolving into ultra-durable, shock-proof, vacuum-tubed contraptions that mounted to car dashboards by the 1960s. ... Louis, and by 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the United States.

Did you know that?

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X - DynaTAC is a series of cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola, Inc. from 1983 to 1994. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X commercial portable cellular phone received approval from the U.S. FCC on September 21, 1983. A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at $3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $9,952 in 2020 source

Then there were the Nokias and Blackberries of the 90s that mainstreamed SMS and then the iPhone in 2007 and all that followed that really hailed in the smartphone era - since the Nokia Communicator was pretty much "business only".

But, it isn't the development of technology that is important to note here, it is the effect it had on society. Just think about as little as 15 years ago, other than the odd SMS, people would talk to each other face to face and have lunch together as friends, not send pictures of what they are having for lunch to strangers. We would walk down the street and see each other's eyes and offer a smile, rather than staring at a screen and swiping left and right for a date. We would go home from work and stop working, because we were unreachable.

The march of mobile communication technology has changed how pretty much everyone on earth lives their life and while there are a lot of positives in this, there are a lot of negatives too - but as we moved forward day by day and over the span of months and years, our habits changed and the way we interact with each other and live our lives, found a new normal - a normal that if a time traveler from a few decades past were to experience, they wouldn't likely say it is for the better, if they could find anyone willing to listen to them speak actual words in real life, that is.

As said, this is where crypto is heading too, as while in many ways it is rudimentary and unfit for mass adoption, each day we are moving toward it and, we have all the other tech we need to empower its progression, as it leverages existing technology. It doesn't require new hardware to be developed, it just need to shift habits by piggybacking on what people already do.

I think this might also be part of the initial hinderance to the adoption process too, because even though the process of blockchain and crypto can fundamentally change the way in which we live our lives, at the enduser level, not much changes.

For instance, my daily life in crypto is spent on social media, playing games, transferring funds, using investment apps and doing precisely what most people are already doing. The only real noticeable differences at a process level is that I have to manage many of these things myself, as I actually own what I hold and as such, I am able to earn on my activity, rather than have interfaces of middleman services extract the value before I get a chance to attract it.

But, once the awareness builds and people start using it to generate value, it reaches a critical mass point where there is enough value in general for more businesses to build specifically for it, meaning that there is also more usecase for consumers to onboard. It is a feedback loop that will see an immense amount of value generated on the blockchains and could happen far faster than people seem to believe.

Thirty years ago people said they would never carry a phone with them now, the same people can't go to the bathroom without it in their hands and if by chance they do forget, they get nervous, like addicts going through the first stages of withdrawal.

Talk about the evolution of needles.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]