The Future of Blockchain - by Derrick Cui

A few weeks ago I left 12 hrs into a blockchain hackathon because our team couldn’t think of anything interesting to build. It seemed every idea we thought of had already been built before at one hackathon or another, and because none of the ideas we came up with would solve a problem non-crypto native people have. At Blockchain at Berkeley, our mantra is “blockchain is a technological solution to a social problem”. But it seems there are fewer and fewer social problems that demand blockchain to solve them. When the Bitcoin whitepaper was written in 2008, the only way to send money was through Western Union, which took up to a week and had a 5% fee. On top of that, this could only be done at physical Western Union locations, typically only available in big cities. Combine that with the backdrop of the global financial crisis, and you get a very convincing reason to use a decentralized, trustless, and pseudo anonymous form of electronic cash that settles in 10 minutes and could be made

A few weeks ago I left 12 hrs into a blockchain hackathon because our team couldn’t think of anything interesting to build. It seemed every idea we thought of had already been built before at one hackathon or another, and because none of the ideas we came up with would solve a problem non-crypto native people have. At Blockchain at Berkeley, our mantra is “blockchain is a technological solution to a social problem”. But it seems there are fewer and fewer social problems that demand blockchain to solve them. When the Bitcoin whitepaper was written in 2008, the only way to send money was through