Blockdate:

Bitcoin: Block 516,517

Ethereum: Block 5,375,816

Gregorian: 04–04–2018 12:42 AM BST

‘Behind any great innovation, lies an element of education.’

Introduction

Every single time you have a new, disruptive technology or infrastructure model, in the first years of adoption we experience chaos. Why? Simply because the new entity is using old, pre-existing infrastructure.

Confusing? Let’s go back in time and give a few examples.

Remember the first car back in 1885? What an amazing invention! Everyone instantly dumped their horses and got into their new BMWs, Lamborghinis and Mercs, didn’t they?

In fact, that’s not true. Everyone questioned this crazy, noisy, disruptive, noise polluting machine. They also predicted failure as they were so accustomed to horses.

Introduce any disruptive technology… Reaction 1: you’ll get resistance.

Everyone will look at you and call you foolish.

“You’re in pursuit of this crazy idea.”

Society will reject you. What’s wrong with you? Automobiles, electricity, the internet, bitcoin, blockchain…ludicrous.

However, with a little bit of persistence, you’ll soon be noticed. You were correct in the first place.

The building blocks of horse town.

What strikes me is that a new disruptive entity must adapt to what’s already existing around it… what it’s about to replace. Think about that first car. It had to live in horse-ville. It had to ride in a city designed for horse infrastructure. No roads. No rules. Plenty and plenty of mud.

Society: you’re riding this noise polluting thing in a horse society — get out!

A few key points as to why horses were better in 1885: They had four legs. Four -‘wheel’-drive. Cars had forward-wheel drive, thus ran on two wheels. Horses could walk in mud. Horses could stay in balance. Horses didn’t die down when their gasoline ran out.

Could a noisy car prove itself in this town? The answer is no. In fact, they got stuck, they failed, they couldn’t balance on two wheels in a muddy city!

What did society say?

“Failed, fraud, bad. No way this will work.”

What happened when we started paving roads though?

Something very interesting.

Humans could use horses which could run on the wonderful, paved roads, nicely and comfortably. But, suddenly new inventions sprung up: bicycles, motorbikes, skateboards, scooters.

By changing the infrastructure, we opened doors to the car, the horse and new entities. Now we have crazy people doing 360s on roller blades and mothers pushing babies in these super prams and many other different types of technologies roaming around the streets.

Now that’s a transformation. Start with what you’ve got, invert it, adapt to it, then the old technology can comfortably live in the new and adapted world using that infrastructure.

Fast forward through the inventions of natural gas, to electricity, and let’s get to another example.

From banks, to bitcoin.

Today, we have bitcoin. A decentralised (not owned by one entity) platform, based on, trust that can settle transaction without a third party. Yet, it lives in horse-town. Horse town equals traditional slow bank accounts, credit cards, IBAN transfers, swift, and third party.

So, we’ve got our Finance Super Ferrari, ready to take off… in a pile of mud and horse waste. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Society: “Fraud. It’s not working. You need to regulate this. It’s a scam. Please slow everything down and adapt to our traditional methods of banking.” Ring any bells?

Did they realise though that what we have here is, like electricity and the internet, a promise of millions of applications that they have yet to imagine?

Now they’re resisting. In the next 5–10 years they’ll adapt. Then they’ll be running their systems on the blockchain. Then suddenly, the whole banking industry will run on one, trustworthy, irreversible, decentralised ledger, on top of bitcoin.

By slowing the process down to the traditional model, we will allow people to adapt. To learn. To feel comfortable. We will open the doors to thousands of applications. Like the car, roller blades and the push pram, which were revolutionary to horse carriages.

We will enable a future of a legacy system. Though, it will be very difficult. People will reject. People will neglect. Once the infrastructure is adapted, the old will ride the new and it will become easy.

We are part of the early stages of the future of money.

“We are going to witness one of, if not the greatest infrastructural transformation the world has ever seen. “ — A. Antonopoulos (2016).

Adoption

Remember, we had to pave roads, to enable new technologies to roam around the streets?

In a similar way, deploying blockchains can be a very difficult task in today’s cryptoverse, due to the nature of the technology.

If you take the horseman, who stigmatised the first car… only until it became commercialised, there had to be an element of adoption. That element was the road that was paved, as a toolbox, to enable all other vehicles to function smoothly. Once you had the infrastructure (asphalt and gravel) put in place, then you were able to build a whole city. Think of it as a tool for accessibility. The road acts as a medium of transport, enabling the cars to be interoperable, and move from place to place.

As a very non-technologically minded individual, when I strolled through Lamden’s telegram, I noticed Stuart Farmer, the CEO, talked about this thing called ‘Saffron.’ ‘A package generator, which can generate a new blockchain, pull down the contract, install it, and deploy the chain in a time frame of 10 minutes.’ Woah, slow down cowboy. In caveman terms?

Imagine, you’re about to pick your next car, but Saffron has already pre-installed its looks, the engine, the paint and galore. All you have to do is pick the outer-packaging. Style it. Get in. Turn the keys. Now you’re ready for a cruise.

This package can be managed by ‘Flora’, its personal smart contract chauffer, which speaks a simple programming language called ‘Seneca’. Now Seneca, will eventually be the language for all chauffeurs to communicate with. It’s simple, its easy, and it works.

Now if you ever wanted to switch cars, without having to go to the car dealership (the intermediary), and sign a truck-load of paperwork, how about using ‘Clove’, an atomic swap protocol that enables you to conduct the swap with no middle man that’s digging out paperwork or strolling through his computer screen to find all the verification documents?

Now every time I’ve used a vehicle as a metaphor, try to digitise it. Try to think of the cars as data points on a blockchain. That’s Lamden in a tiny nutshell.

The good thing about this whole journey? It’s open source. Similar to a grand-prix open air track. So, everyone can see how stylish you are, what choices you make, and the way you roll.

Are you telling me that I can almost automate the process, similar to a video game, where I find a pre-packaged car, of my choice, which has a private chauffer, speaks its own language, and is open for everyone to see me rock n’ roll?

Well… kind of.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s talk a little more Lamden.

Lamden is an open source suite of developer tools for enterprises wanting to deploy their own blockchain. Think of what ‘Microsoft Office’ is to Microsoft, or ‘G Suite’ is to Google. Lamden is the equivalent suite of developing tools to Blockchain technology. Lamden enables one to set up a new blockchain in under 10 minutes. Due to the integration of Atomic Swaps, one’s newly birthed blockchain can communicate with a plethora of other blockchains.

Easy tiger.

What gives the TAU token its value?

1. By staking the TAU token for masternodes, witnesses or delegates, one can receive payments derived from fees to run this operation.

2. One can receive more fees by acting as a liquidity provider to ‘Clove,’ the Atomic Swap engine.

3. Speaking of value, enterprises that want to run their networks at a speed of up to 10,000 transactions per second can benefit from Lamden.

I’ve still got a tough road ahead to master crypto-wizardry, but daily knowledge, education and fundamentals which shed light through Lamden’s vibrant community, enable me to further grasp the future of finance from a technical standpoint.

Much love,

JP.

Twitter: @cryptomera

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