Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase digital currency exchange, said Bitcoin (BTC) could be overtaken by other digital coins as the crypto industry matures.
In a series of tweets, Armstrong highlights the parallels between early Internet and cryptocurrency. He says the challenges that early Internet developers faced are comparable to those that are tracking the young crypto industry today.
“At Netscape, they worked with the first Internet protocols. Things weren’t very scalable (switched modems), you had to be somewhat technical to figure out how to connect, and the first websites were pretty basic (static sites, looked like toys).
Does this sound familiar to you with cryptography?
They thought they would try to make a shopping cart (see if they could create a first party app).
There was no way to save the state or create a session (for example, to make a basket), so they created the concept of cookies.
Then the next problem was that nobody wanted to put a credit card on the Internet because all the plain text on http. So they went to invent SSL / HTTPS. “
Armstrong says that, just as early Internet users developed better web tools, the 11-year-old crypto industry is also preparing for new solutions.
“The slow Internet / dial-up speed models reflect the early challenges of scaling blockchains.
SSL and HTTPs are similar to some of the privacy room efforts. “
Based on the parallels of the two industries, Armstrong cites the characteristics that digital coins need for the crypto industry to reach mass adoption.
“For me, the biggest areas of development that I see and think I need to be successful as an industry are: 1. Scalability – we need block chains that can reach at least thousands of TPS to get general adoption of crypto (similar to broadband internet being a big unlock on the web)
2. Privacy – maybe a different view, but I think we will need privacy pieces, just like we needed HTTPS by default on the web, for many long-term crypto use cases. Everyone deserves access to financial services and financial confidentiality. “
Scalability and transaction privacy are two features that Bitcoin currently lacks. Because of these gaps, Armstrong says there is ultimately an opportunity for an altcoin to become the dominant crypto asset in the future.
In conclusion: I think it is still very unresolved which blockchain will help move the cryptography from around 50 million users to 5B. The chain that successfully ships some of these scalability, privacy, decentralized identity and development tools will be one step ahead.
– Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 4, 2020
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