On Innovation Shifts

Innovations happen continuously. New innovations often leave the previous ones in the shadow, and rapid change often refers to social development. These are the things we already know. But if we put these aside, why do we need innovations? What's wrong with the ones that we already have?

We humans abuse existing innovations greatly. We are first-class abusers in consumption. What if we were given an abuse-resistant innovation? Well, we don't like things that way.

Some won't like it, but I will discuss this topic mainly through the philosophical review of blockchains - this is a reasonable way to reflect today's innovation standards.

Abusing the Gold

What if Bitcoin is this abuse-resistant innovation?

Earlier this month, I met a very early miner of Bitcoin who thinks that Satoshi is an AI from the future. Yes, actually. After thinking for a while, I somewhat understood his perspective.

Experts often compare gold with Bitcoin, but they focus on financial metrics. People mostly skip how neither of these two is abusable, but this is significant. Bitcoin protects itself from outside abuse by protecting its application layer. In fact, this may have been an intentional decision.

The Application Layer

The application layer is where we build applications on top of an underlying technology. Think about Ethereum. It allows many games, decentralized applications, semi-centralized marketplaces, and more to be built on top of it. Ethereum achieves this with its extensible application layer. This is how it gathers communities from different backgrounds - gamers, traders, sellers, and more. Yet, they also have a critical weakness.

Technologies with extensible application layers are open to abuse by developers who build on them. In this case, Ethereum, Near, and Solana are heavily commercialized with a highly accessible application layer, which could be abused with uncontrollable developer adoption.

Innovationomics

The definition of innovation still needs further work for a collective agreement. Yet, I define it as "combining existing technologies or inventing new ones to build socially or economically constructive application layers."

So, I don't define applications as innovations; they depend on their underlying innovation. For example, Netflix and Duolingo are excellent services to humanity, but they use various innovations. One may say Kubernetes is one, and server-to-client architecture is another. Interestingly, Shopify and WordPress may be considered semi-innovations because they provide application layers.

Needless to say, almost all blockchains are innovations, even Bitcoin. It also has an application layer - it's just limited.

We humans have this abusive trait of overwhelming application layers. Technically, they may be able to handle high growth. Yet, the social aspect is another. We have suffered greatly due to abuses on different application layers.

Historical Circularity

New innovations happen all the time, but they tend to concentrate when we harshly abuse the application layer of innovation, and it starts bleeding. When it bleeds, we understand that it is not bulletproof enough.

One example is the commercialization of the Internet. This led to the early abuse of commercial distributed systems, primarily client-server models. GPS, search engines, and web browsers followed as new applicational use cases. Then, the dot-com bubble exploded, a significant financial crisis in history.

As a response, people showed greater interest in AI and decentralized systems. This was our reaction to ourselves, not the Internet. We saw (once more) that we could be trusted. Unconsciously, we thought taking the control away from us might be better, so we focused on AI and p2p systems among hundreds.

Blockchain may have a similar fate or not. Time will show. A question worth answering here is, can Bitcoin be a bulletproof technology?

AI From the Future?

Bitcoin was the first implemented innovation that appeared to be a more bulletproof system than any other. In a sense, it challenged our social pattern of application layer abuse - simply by not extending its application layer for us. This is something only a top-tier intellected could have visioned. So, I see why one would question the interference of extraordinary things.

If you ask my opinion, which you probably don't, combining technical intellect with post-human ideas is just not me.

The more important question is, can Bitcoin change our historical pattern of innovation abuse? I don't think so.

Human Soul

Technologies fade when their time comes. For natively smart contract executable blockchains, I expect this to happen due to mass adoption and abuse in the application layer.

For Bitcoin, it is harder to guess when and how. Yet, its time will come. Tech is getting more and more commercialized every day, and things are expected to keep up. If they cannot, I guess they just fade in time.

There are already some efforts to extend Bitcoin's application layer. Of course, this would make Bitcoin vulnerable to outside abuse, and hence some oppose it. Opposers want Bitcoin to stay as the infra purely built for financial transactions. I think Bitcoin's application layer should be extended - even if not natively.

Change comes all the time, and we have adapted to change. After all this time of evolution, why would we adapt to a strong stagnation? It is easier to adapt to what's coming rather than conflicting with our nature of questioning and experimenting with new things. Without some excitement, curiosity, and greed, who would ever evolve?