Chickens and Eggs – How Do You Grow a Global Network from Scratch?

Earlier this year, to commemorate the occasion of Bitcoin having reached a $1 trillion market cap, the data-centric website Visual Capitalist ran a comparison. It looked at how long the major tech stocks had taken to achieve their own $1 trillion valuation compared to BTC. This analysis is interesting because you can chart the impact of technology on the time it takes to reach a $1 trillion market cap. As the earliest pre-internet tech pioneers, Microsoft and Apple had to wait over four decades to hit $1 trillion. The advent of the internet cut the time in half for dot-com babies Amazon and Google, which hit their $1 trillion valuations in 24 and 21 years, respectively. With the introduction of blockchain, Bitcoin’s $1 trillion market cap came after half as much time again – just twelve years. Reach is What Matters It’s not the technology by itself that has created this accelerating pace of adoption. It’s the fact that these two major developments – the internet and blockchain-enabled reach. The connectivity of the internet allowed tech firms to reach exponentially more users. The emergence of blockchain and its innovative economic model provided a new way for users to become engaged and participate in the value of a network. And now, projects are using the unique properties of blockchain to build and scale vast global networks. The creators of Nodle started out with the idea of a mesh network powered by smartphones. However, ...