The future of ledger systems
A very short summary of ten points I made a few time lately regarding the strategic outlook of ledger (aka enterprise blockchain) systems, targeted at companies in the process of deciding whether to {do, wait, ignore}.
1. Ledgers will take over the value creation that happens between enterprises, the rest will safely stay behind the “enterprise perimeter”.
2. Hard to give an estimate over the near-term split between the two (I know everyone wants that), but it will gradually shift towards “between” over a possibly long time horizon. Simply because the reasons why enterprises keep processes in-house will erode.
3. The main value driver is increased integrity of multi-stage value chains, not the much-hoped-for disintermediation or decentralization.
4. And yes, no system will ever be adopted unless it increases efficiency at scale.
5. Which means perfect solutions for an imperfect world will end up with all the others that looked really good in theory.
6. Payload requirements will be far bigger than just timestamped transfers.
7. The goal is to be able to pinpoint a loss in integrity at such a low cost that breaching integrity becomes a dominated move.
8. That’s overall cost, not just marginal cost of detection.
9. Under these premises, the different types of value chains (product, service, information, payment) suddenly become quite similar. The trickier boundary will be between B and C.
10. Biggest fallacy right now is to hold out in the hope of becoming a “fast follower”. There is still no guarantee whatsoever that “blockchains will take over the world”, but the required expertise will soon be out of reach for followers.
