When you go get some cash at an ATM, you might find a magnetic stripe reader or an NFC sensor that decodes information in your card. Then you enter your PIN on a pad, select some options on a screen, and finally, the ATM spits out cash.
Behind that process is a connection to the ATM’s network that then redirects the questions (“Does this guy have enough funds?”, “Is the PIN ok?”) to your bank’s central servers. This connection happens by using a leased line — a dedicated private connection provided by a telecommunications services provider. This is considered highly secure and reliable. However, some modern ATMs rely on Internet connections instead. Although less expensive, it is also less secure.
Regardless of the connection used, messages transmitted between network nodes are serialized by using specialized protocols such as ISO 8583, all of this is secured by using encryption, firewalls, and so on, so forth.
But unless you are a technical individual, terms like leased line, encryption, firewalls, and ISO 8583 may be unfamiliar. And even technical individuals might not know a single thing about ISO 8583. You go, use your card and your PIN and get some cash from a bank account.
This is called abstraction.
Just as microwave manufacturers discourage messing with the magnetron manually and will give you a button with a chicken icon so you can defrost your chicken, banks don’t want you managing communication between nodes in private networks.
Abstraction.
Crypto mass adoption is a lost cause because of this.
Developers will let you manipulate the magnetron or the ATM network communication at your own risk, and that’s ok. From a philosophical standpoint is precisely what we want. But you shouldn’t be asked to do so because if you don’t, you are out.
And then we have the way technology is promoted.
While asking people to learn about tech might be a noble cause, not all users are interested in learning about tech.
There’s not enough abstraction. There’s no button to defrost your chicken. You have to store your seed phrase following some Reddit recipe, in pieces of paper, or engraved in metal (steel engraving was introduced in 1792 by Jacob Perkins, an American inventor, for banknote printing). You have to check every character of your address to receive crypto or check every character of the destination of a transaction you want to send. You have to know the protocol, and sometimes calculate the fees so your transaction won’t get stuck somewhere forever.
You have to learn about DEXs, bridges, wormholes, zero-knowledge, SHA-256, and SegWit (which split Bitcoin into multiple chains because of a war between developers and miners, and at the time even developers didn’t fully understand).
You have to be in tech or you’re out of the race.
So yeah, “TradFi” is winning. Big surprise.
While asking people to learn about tech might be a noble cause, not all users are interested in learning about tech. They don’t need to learn to code to use an ATM, so why would they make the jump? Why would they adopt cryptocurrencies? They just want to buy groceries and pay with their cell phones. Would we as developers learn medicine to take aspirin?
We are losing against TradFi. Even so, in the above-mentioned examples, DeFi, Blockchain, and Crypto are bad jokes. We sell that decentralization brings the democratization of banking, of payments, etc. You just need to learn this whole stack of tech, set up some validator nodes, and a multi-sig scheme for your funds and you are in the club.
Originally written by Derek Nechayev for the Jinca blog
Derek is an IT analyst exploring crypto tech since 2018. At the time of writing, he hodls small amounts of BTC and ETH only. His opinions are for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice in any way or form.
