A serious post for once

 I saw someone on Twitter comment that the market cap of Zoom has now surpassed that of the oil majors, and that the industrial age is now giving way to the digital age. 

It just struck me how amazing that was. 

Mere decades ago, people were hand-writing letters and posting them. All the information that you could transmit to someone in another place was your writing on a physical piece of paper that had to be delivered physically by a middle-man (postal services). A middle-man that is enabled by the industrial age in the form of fossil fuels, ships and aeroplanes.

The Internet changed all that. The information that I can transmit no longer had to be physical. I can make this blog post and anyone else in the world can see it as long as they have an Internet connection. I can send an email. And now with Zoom, I can video-call. Zoom is the middle-man that has been enabled by the Internet to deliver such a service. Previous middle-men like the postal services still exist, but their importance in our lives has diminished. 

Now, it is argued that the blockchain is going to bring forth a new wave of change. Not only can you transmit information, you can transmit value. But, you say, I can already do an online bank transfer, what's the point of a blockchain?  

A bank is a middle-man like a postal service. It makes use of the Internet to provide banking services. In effect, when you transfer money online from person A to person B, it goes from person A to the bank account of person A, and then it goes to the bank account of person B before it goes to person B. Whereas using the blockchain, it can go direct from person A to person B. 

Bitcoin is perhaps the email of the age of blockchain. It's probably pointless right now to speculate on what's the Zoom equivalent of the blockchain. A better question would be, what is the Blogger equivalent? What is the Yahoo equivalent?