I love the weird and fascinating culture that has grown up around bitcoin.

Highlights include the endless speculation about its mysterious and unknown inventor, the countless inside jokes (like “This is Gentleman!”) and the bizarre milestones that the community loves to commemorate — like “bitcoin pizza day”. This culture is an important element of a new theory I have been developing, the“blockchain trifecta”.

It is my belief that the truly innovative aspects of any blockchain network occur when there is the right mix of these three elements.

First and foremost, the technology is what really matters. Before there was a community to troll or a market to trade, someone had to come up with a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem in order to kick off this remarkable tidal wave of blockchain innovations.

Alas, the technology alone was not enough. In order to really get things rolling, there had to be some financial incentives, or “animal spirits” as Keynes called it. There needed to be a reason for people to get involved that has nothing to do with clever cryptography. That reason is simple — people want to get rich. Bitcoin Pizza Day matters because it was the first time that people were willing to exchange any form of value for these seemingly worthless digital tokens.

Which brings us back to where we began — the culture and community that has grown up around bitcoin. This is a crucial element, and in some ways more important than even the underlying technology because it is people who feed the markets with liquidity and spend countless hours evolving this technology. If you need any more evidence, check out the ongoing civil war between r/bitcoin and r/btc as they wrestle over the lingering blocksize debate.

This analogy is not just for Bitcoin — I have found that these three elements can be used to evaluate almost any blockchain project. Ethereum, for example, has a thriving community of developers, entrepreneurs, and traders with its own set of inside jokes and aspirations.

This trifecta is also critical to consider if you are engaged in corporate blockchain development for huge corporations — like R3 or HyperLedger. These situations will not have the crazy meme-culture of r/bitcoin, but they still require all three of these elements to align, otherwise nothing will come of it.

So whether you are building a DAAP, thinking of investing in an ICO or if you are unfortunate enough to be designing a “use-case” for some private blockchain on an ill-fated blockchain project — try to keep these three elements in mind so that you don’t end up wasting time/money.