Hive: Technology Is Often The Long Game
We live in a world where instant gratification is the in thing. Over the last 15 years, we became accustomed to instant success stories. Build and app which leads one to becoming a billionaire in under 18 months. Forget about the fact that the would would have survived without Snapchat or whatever the latest IPO craze was.
Building is what offers opportunities that change the world. Disruption is a powerful thing. However, the key is to remember that it often does not happen overnight.
Right now, Amazon is one of the most discussed companies in the world. Without a doubt, this single entity upended the entire retail industry, at least in the west. Few question the power of this company today.
Yet, people forget that it was not always this way. Amazon was founded in the mid 1990s at the start of the Internet Age. This means the company was roughly 20 years old before it started to succeed, at least according to Wall Street's metrics.
Notice how it took them more than a decade to start generating any serious revenue. Things were slow for 10 years before we see it hitting the exponential growth curve around 2006. The problem is they still were not making much money.
Their net income was roughly $3 billion on $177 billion in revenue. The income line was rather flat for years. Then, something happened.
The net income started to explode. A couple years after the first chart, Amazon was raking in the same amount in a quarter as it was previously in a full year. This is akin to 4x growth.
Along the way, there were many doubters of Amazon. I still recall some analysts saying how they could not justify a $400 price tag for Amazon's stock.
Another company that is falling into this category is Tesla. This is one of the most divided stocks on Wall Street. Bulls absolutely love what is taking place while bears are against everything that is going on.
That aside, here is what the Tesla chart looks like on an annual basis of the important metrics. Notice the similar trend to Amazon.
As we can see, the revenues are exploding (Amazon in 2006) yet the income is lagging. This is the first year in a while that the company will produce a full year of operating profit.
It is important to remember Tesla was started in 2003.
These example exemplify how disruption can take a long time to materialize. There is little doubt that Amazon totally whacked the retail sector while Tesla is causing major headaches for the traditional automakers. At the same time, we are starting to see transformations in others areas such as energy.
Cryptocurrency is the same way. There are a lot of people who get down about the price on things not understanding that price often does not reflect what is going on with an entity. It is very common for people like the aforementioned analyst to not be able to "justify Amazon at $400". Many look at the price of cryptocurrency and believe something must be worthless simply because the price is not mooning.
Bitcoin only started 11 years ago and for the first 5 years, nobody knew about it. Only in the last 5 or 6 years has Bitcoin got any real attention. Of course, this was marred by a 2-3 year period where the only attention from the media was negative as a giant FUD campaign took place.
Ethereum just celebrated 5 years. The second largest blockchain, at least by market cap, is Amazon around the turn of the century. That is how early we are in this game.
Hive, the blockchain this post is on, is barely over 4 years old. Since the fork, we are talking about the ecosystem being 7 months old.
The point is these technologies are in the earliest of stages. DeFi took off in 2020, something that was brewing for a couple years. Nevertheless, if things go as many foresee, the entire DeFi space is a drop in the bucket compared to where it will be in a couple years. The billions in there now will turn into hundreds of billions of dollars.
Patience is key with any new technology. The reason for this is there are two pieces to consider. The first is the technological advancement. This is dependent upon the developers to bring out the features and applications that people will use.
The second is the acceptance and embracing of said technology. To a large degree, this is dependent upon the developers since the offering need to be there. We also need certain characteristics such as ease of use, which crypto is presently lacking.
Sometimes, with technology, we simply have to wait for the world to be ready. Hive often promotes itself as censorship resistant. This is useless if the world does not really care about censorship. Up until recently, I believe this was the case.
Sure it made for nice talking points but few were really concerned. Recent events, however, are starting to bring this to the forefront. Perhaps a greater majority of the world is ready to embrace this concept as vital.
We could say the same about privacy, decentralized data, and true scientific discussion. For the time being, these categories only receive lip service from the majority of the population. We will see if it takes on greater meaning to people down the road.
Disruption takes time. Established entities are firmly entrenched and people tend to follow habitual behavior. The process of disruption is often slow in the early stages until it reaches that breaking point. For the companies mentioned, it hit for Amazon a while back and Tesla looks like it might be nearing that point.
For cryptocurrency, we are still further back on the scale. We are pushing forward but it seems at a slow rate. This will not be the case forever. At some point in time, the masses will suddenly be awakened and a lot of people will flock to applications built on blockchains.
Until that time, we just need to keep plugging along.
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