As I said, the one thing I’ve been searching for ever since I got into crypto is for someone to describe what the world could look like if crypto actually wins. But before we can do that, we need to figure out how crypto is going to win in the first place.
While it may seem to some that crypto has come a long way over the past 14 years, I’d argue we’ve made little progress in terms of its original use case as peer-to-peer electronic cash. Yes we’ve seen new developments in areas such as smart contracts, NFTs, and defi protocols, but those aren’t the things I originally fell in love with about crypto.
This is why I think Avalanche pre-consensus on the eCash network is such a big deal. I believe the reason the electronic cash meme hasn’t made much progress since 2009 is because the technology itself hasn’t made much progress. Imagine if the iPhone today was basically the same as the one that came out in 2007? What if using the internet still required dial-up modems instead of the broadband we all use today?
I’m guessing smartphones and internet usage wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much traction if those technologies hadn’t evolved as much as they did. The initial excitement would have quickly waned if years later people were still being forced to wait several minutes for a static web page to load. But we all know that’s not what happened. Year after year we witnessed these technologies dramatically improve, and the number of users dramatically increased as a result.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin and the rest of crypto has yet to even come close to reaching Visa level scale. Users still have to deal with long wait times, high transaction fees, and an overall poor user experience. But what if that was no longer the case? What if we finally had a cryptocurrency that lived up to the name of magic internet money?
I’m confident that the activation of Avalanche pre-consensus can give us the version of electronic cash we’ve all been dreaming of. It will mean no more having to wait for a transaction to be confirmed in a block, transactions will always be cheap and typically finalize in 2 seconds or less, all while paving the way to massive on-chain scaling by solving a major bottleneck that has plagued Bitcoin since its inception.
Though there’s still no word on exactly when we can expect pre-consensus to be announced, I am optimistic that when it does happen, it will be our broadband moment. It will signal to the world that eCash is that much closer to achieving mass adoption, and we can finally begin to imagine all the incremental steps that will be needed in order to get there.
In my next article, I will attempt to imagine what eCash’s future might look like.