The blockchain revolution started with a nine page white paper, launching bitcoin, the first trustless cryptocurrency. Six years later, the Ethereum white paper proposed smart contracts, a major advancement in decentralized programming. Meanwhile, Mastercoin launched the era of project funding by running the first ICO ever. From that point onwards, forward-looking innovation has virtually stopped.

Forward-looking innovation is the process of recognizing a foundational need, believing that the need can be addressed, and solving all the problems that arise in the interim. These are Bitcoin and Ethereum — the two projects that shaped what we expect the decentralized system to do, whereas previously, the word “decentralized” had no special meaning whatsoever.

Contrary to this, backward-looking innovation is the process of taking an existing solution and applying it differently, or taking a need already recognized and providing a different solution. Backward-looking innovation does not generate quantum leaps, it is a mere incremental improvement to something that is already there. It largely follows similar patterns, recombines existing solutions in a new way, or applies existing models to new categories of problems.

These are two fundamentally different processes. Forward-looking innovation constitutes a shift in consciousness, while backward-looking innovation builds upon expectations that are already there. Developers of many soon-to-come-online blockchain platforms are working within the parameters created by the tectonic shifts of the past, building on the process relevant people already understand. They fit into the patterns we are used to: whitepaper, ICO, token, consensus algorithm, smart contract language. The deviations are minor and will not challenge you in spirit, only in detail.

In contrast, forward-looking innovation will challenge the spirit of what is going on. These inventions will always first evoke the canned question of “why not use this existing thing that works just fine?” Understanding them will require you to imagine a new future. For many people, until the new future is experienced, it will not be understood at all. For others, it will bring about the inevitable question of whether this other future is better than the one before it. In either case, forward-looking innovation must experience a perceptual obstacle, a period not unlike being pulled towards the apex of a roller coaster. What follows it, however, will be an “aaaaaah” moment. A ride unlike anything.

What’s interesting about the decentralization space is that we are still in the “aaaaaah” period, riding the energy generated by the first platforms and the realization of richness they brought into our collective consciousness. At the same time, this space is dominated by the backward-looking innovation, incremental improvements and syntheses.

This is not a bad a thing. Digesting and recombining recent tectonic shifts in thinking is a really important stage in the overall progress. However, the problem arises when backward-looking innovation drowns out all the further fundamental shifts. From this point of view the blockchain space is incredibly conservative.

What is happening here is that the deep innovative nature of the space is the actual cause of its conservatism. Like a man who enters a dark room gravitates towards the part of it he has already explored, so are we, who believe that the models provided by the major innovators of the last ten years are the only safe models to use.

This is not so. There is no safety in adhering to patterns already explored. In fact, those trying to do so are destined to failure both from the pressures of having to integrate with the mainstream society that will only become greater, and from the lack of agility implied but not yet experienced within the current approaches.

The next foundational shifts will challenge not just the minds of new mainstream adopters, but also the minds of seasoned crypto enthusiasts. And even if not as impactful as the original bitcoin white paper (who can ever compete with that?!) they will be no less defining to our collective future, the one that will actually come to be.

So keep your minds open. Explore decentralization in all its beauty and richness. When someone comes to you offering a payment platform that is decentralized but does not use blockchain, flex your mind to understand that it may be just as interesting as blockchain, if not more. When someone offers a new programming language for decentralized systems, don’t just ask what’s wrong with Solidity, as this question is so fundamentally flawed as to be the antithesis to innovation, prompting someone to commit a grave sin of putting down the genius that came before. See things for what they are, what they bring. Not how they are in contradiction to the past, but how they are in synergy with the future. Experiment. Enable others. Dream.

As crypto enthusiasts we may think we know what the new future looks like, because we took a mental leap once or twice before. Guess what, we don’t. Only the humble ones who understand this and are brave enough to challenge this new future with an even newer one will create anything worth a damn in the long run. Challenging recent innovation with the next wave of ideas is what true respect for the innovators like Satoshi looks like. Not valuing bitcoin or ether above all other currencies.