Forks On The Road

A Look At New Technologies Through The Lens of The Blockchain

8 min readAug 5, 2018

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled — Richard Feynman

Consistency is hard work. Particularly, when the future has many forks on the road. A fork is a metaphor for a life changing choice. The Blockchain will witness many such forks on it’s road to global, mainstream adoption. For instance, the scalability challenge has developers scrambling to develop alternate ways of achieving consensus. These include sharding, using Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work, off-chain transactions etc. Take one step further and a whole new challenge appears on the horizon. Think quantum computing and it’s effect on rendering many of the cryptographic algorithms practically useless. These are foreseen challenges. There could be other unknown unknowns further down the road. This article looks at some of the challenges the Blockchain faces today and will likely face in the future. No matter what the future looks like, it is going to be a very interesting and perhaps life changing journey.

Setting The Stage

The biggest threats to nascent technologies are newer technologies that force these new technologies to adapt or risk obsolescence. Take the case of Virtual Reality (VR) as a technology. VR has come a long way from being the stuff of science fiction to its entry into the living rooms of millions of homes. However, it’s greater adoption is hindered by the fact that it requires a headset on the head at all times which can cause motion sickness due to prolonged exposure. Augmented Reality (AR) is trying to be another alternative but it’s not immersive. It simply overlays digital world on the real world. The least obtrusive, then, would be to put a chip in the brain but the thought of an implant can send shivers down the spines of many. However, the thing to remember is that we live in a world where.