ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within 5 days, 1 million users had tried the app. In two months, it had more than 100 million users. That's a new world record for how quickly people adopted the service. 13 million people use the app every day. Converted to TPS, that would be 150. AI is used by about 50 times more people per day than Bitcoin. New startups are emerging literally every day and want to use AI for their business. It is almost certain that AI will change the world within the next decade. Wait, didn't they say the same thing about blockchain? Why is blockchain adoption so slow compared to ChatGPT? If you look into history, you will find that AI and blockchain have roots in the distant past. Cardano can be considered a publicly available solution, with decades of development behind each technology that is used. It's good to know that if a killer application emerges, the world can adopt it very quickly. Just as AI is celebrating mass success with ChatGPT, the blockchain industry is sure to succeed. We just need to keep on developing technology and finding applications. Come see what AI and blockchain have in common in terms of technology development and what that could mean for Cardano. TLDR People believe that the history of blockchain projects dates back to the time of their launch. These projects use technologies that are much older. The AI industry had to go through an "AI winter" lasting more than a decade. The blockchain industry may experience a “crypto winter” before it succeeds. The evolution of the blockchain industry has certainly not stopped with the launch of Bitcoin. Smart contracts, tokenization, PoS, and decentralized governance are all things that came after Bitcoin. We are waiting for ChatGPT of the blockchain industry. Bitcoin is not the first attempt to create a cryptocurrency. It's hard to imagine it being the last possible attempt. The idea of a decentralized global computer is sound and if Cardano fails people will make another attempt. But Cardano is still at the beginning, so it's a successful project so far. The history of AI will help us understand the blockchain industry It may surprise you to know that AI technology has its roots in the 1950s and it has been used in industry for decades. ChatGPT is only the first publicly available app that has succeeded en masse. Take a look at how AI has evolved and what the industry has had to go through to the present day where we can use it for our own purposes for free. The modern concept of AI emerged in the 1950s with the development of computers and the theory of computation. Mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed the "Turing Test" in 1950, which became a fundamental concept in AI research. The earliest AI systems were developed in academic and government research labs in the 1950s and 1960s. They were used primarily for scientific and military applications, such as weather forecasting and missile guidance. In the 1970s and 1980s, AI research focused on building expert systems, which were designed to mimic the decision-making processes of human experts in a particular domain. These systems were often based on sets of rules or if-then statements and were used in a variety of applications, including medicine, finance, and engineering. It led to the adoption of AI in industries such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Expert systems were used for tasks such as credit scoring, medical diagnosis, and quality control. In the 1980s and 1990s, AI research shifted towards neural networks and machine learning. Neural networks are a type of algorithm that is modeled on the structure of the human brain and can be trained to recognize patterns and make predictions. Machine learning is a broader field that encompasses a variety of algorithms and techniques for building intelligent systems that can learn from data. Neural networks and machine learning became more widely used particularly in fields such as finance and marketing. These techniques were used for tasks such as fraud detection and customer segmentation. In the 2010s, AI research made significant advances in deep learning, which uses neural networks with many layers to process complex data, such as images and speech. This was made possible in part by the availability of large amounts of data, which enabled researchers to train more complex models. It led to a surge in AI adoption in industries such as e-commerce, finance, and healthcare. AI was used for tasks such as personalized marketing, credit scoring, and medical diagnosis. Today, AI is being used in a wide range of applications, from self-driving cars to medical diagnosis to natural language processing. AI systems are becoming more sophisticated and capable, and researchers are working on developing more general AI that can learn and reason across multiple domains. It may seem that the development of AI has been straightforward, but this is not the case and the industry has gone through a phase called AI winter. It refers to a period of time in the history of artificial intelligence research when funding for AI projects decreased significantly, and public interest in the field waned. The term was first used in the 1980s, after a period of optimism in the 1960s and 1970s, when researchers believed that artificial intelligence would soon be able to solve many of the world's problems. During the AI winter, progress in the field slowed, and many researchers shifted their focus to other areas of computer science. The AI winter lasted until the 1990s when advances in machine learning and neural networks led to renewed interest in the field. Since then, AI has seen rapid growth and development, with applications in a wide range of industries and fields. Have you ever heard of "crypto winter"? Some believe that the blockchain industry went through this phase between 2017 and 2021. However, it is possible that this period is still ongoing and will only end when adoption increases dramatically. The blockchain industry is waiting for its killer application. One could say we are waiting for ChatGPT of the blockchain industry. If you ever think that there is still no use for blockchain, that people are afraid of self-custody, that technological development is slow, or that regulators are deliberately trying to stifle the industry, don't despair. Crypto winter may take a few years or decades, but one day it will very likely succeed just like the internet did a few decades ago and now (finally) AI. It may be that we need to invent the next key technology that moves the blockchain industry in the right direction. Or maybe we just need to link multiple technologies together and create an app that everyone will want to use. We are confident that the blockchain industry will succeed. The use of AI has expanded with its development and the same will be true for the blockchain industry. Cardano is one of the technology leaders in the industry. Research is ongoing in other projects and at universities. In another decade, blockchain will allow us to do the things we are talking about today. How can the entire industry be advanced by, for example, the development and adoption of zero-knowledge cryptography? I dare say significantly. The blockchain industry uses decade-old technology Let's take a brief look at the different technologies that are used for Bitcoin and thus by many other blockchain projects. You will see for yourself that individual projects like Cardano or Bitcoin are basically just the result of a long scientific effort and use blockchain as a fundamental technology. They can be seen as publicly available applications that someone else can use, like ChatGBT. Both ChatGBT and Cardano are basically just tools. The blockchain industry originated with the launch of Bitcoin, but the individual components are much older. This is somewhat reminiscent of AI development. The concept of blockchain technology has its roots in the work of Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, who published a series of papers on "Secure Names for Bit-Strings" in the early 1990s. These papers proposed a system for using cryptographic hashes to create a tamper-proof chain of blocks, which could be used to create a secure, time-stamped record of digital documents. While the work of Haber and Stornetta laid the theoretical groundwork for blockchain technology, it was not until the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 that the technology was first implemented in a practical, decentralized system. Asymmetric cryptography, also known as public-key cryptography, was invented in the mid-1970s by a group of researchers led by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. Their seminal paper "New Directions in Cryptography" was published in 1976 and introduced the concept of public-key cryptography, which enables secure communication over an insecure channel without requiring a shared secret key. This technology essentially allows us to own digital assets. The first known consensus algorithm was the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithm, which was proposed by Barbara Liskov and Miguel Castro in 1999. The concept of Proof of Work was first introduced in a 1993 paper by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, who proposed using a computationally intensive task as a way of preventing spam and denial-of-service attacks in computer networks. In 1997, Adam Back introduced the concept of "hashcash," which used Proof of Work to enable email senders to prove that they had expended a certain amount of computational effort in order to send an email. Distributed networks have their roots in the early days of computer networking in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the earliest examples of a distributed network was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was developed in the late 1960s. Over the years, the ARPANET evolved into the internet, which is the world's largest and most widely distributed network. Distributed networks include peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which enable users to share resources and information directly with each other without relying on a centralized server or authority. P2P networks are used for a wide range of applications, including file sharing, online gaming, social networking, and of course, cryptocurrencies. We certainly haven't mentioned all the technologies and knowledge that Bitcoin uses. We could talk about many other technologies, theories, or knowledge from other areas of human activity. Let's add that Cardano's roots go back to 2014. The network was launched in 2017. However, the team didn't start from scratch and leverage existing, aforementioned technologies. Cardano was inspired by its predecessors Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other projects. The story continues The evolution of the blockchain industry has certainly not stopped with the launch of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will be just one of many evolutionary stages of the industry. After Bitcoin, Ethereum emerged and the concept of a global decentralized operating system was born. Smart contracts allow anyone to create a globally available and unstoppable application whose rules cannot be changed. Smart contract platforms enabled tokenization and the world experienced NFT mania. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is more than 99% energy efficient. PoS allows literally every user to participate in decentralization without high upfront costs. Cardano will have decentralized governance. Decentralization will not only be about the protocol (network consensus) but also about the users who can actively participate in it. The development goes on and has certainly not stopped. Technological progress and innovation cannot be stopped by launching a single project. The blockchain industry will be very different in another 10 years than it is today. In another 20 or 30 years, it may be as widespread as the internet and AI. The development of Bitcoin has essentially stopped and the community has bet mainly on the development of the Lightning Network. Cardano is deliberately going in a different direction. The community will decide on the development of the first layer of the protocol through decentralized governance. This is a very bold experiment in decentralization and definitely a step forward. Whether the project is successful or not, we will definitely have a lot of new insights on how to build technology with our own budget and without central control. Sometimes people argue that everything that came after Bitcoin will find no application. We could say the same thing about blockchain. It took 20 years to put the theoretical knowledge to practical use for Bitcoin. Something similar could be said about Proof-of-Work and other technologies. At a time when new things are being created and new concepts are being tried, it is impossible to say unequivocally that a given technology will not find a use. There were several attempts to create digital currencies before Bitcoin, but none of them gained significant traction or widespread adoption. However, one of the earliest digital currencies was DigiCash, which was created by computer scientist David Chaum in 1989. Other early attempts at digital currencies include B-Money, proposed by Wei Dai in 1998, and Bit Gold, proposed by Nick Szabo in 2005. These early projects laid the groundwork for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that followed. Today we all believe that Bitcoin will be a successful project and other blockchains too, including Cardano. The reality is that all current blockchain projects may fail and cease to exist for one reason or another. It is unlikely, but it is possible. In terms of history, it's not a big deal and surely a new attempt would come along in time. Global decentralized money is a sound concept much like a global decentralized computer. The failure of current projects will help push the boundaries of our knowledge. If Cardano fails, people will learn from the failure of predecessors and make another similar attempt sooner or later. However, it is premature to think this way now, as Cardano is still in its infancy and has been a successful project so far. One aspect of success is the right time. Is now the right time for global money or a global decentralized operating system? No one can answer that question either. It is possible that current research and projects will be the springboard for our children's generation, who will need the current concepts more than we do now. Conclusion Cardano is a working blockchain and the community is growing. The project has roughly ten years for the team (along with the community) to refine the technology and for someone to create a killer app. It can be a single app that people will adopt at a rapid rate of millions of users per day, or a set of multiple different apps with a slower adoption rate. Several different paths can lead to success. It's smart to see the blockchain industry in the context of another industry, as it helps us separate the noise from the signal. The success of a technology is always linked to pushing the boundaries of what is possible or feasible to the point where the project is complete and demand for use begins to grow significantly. The blockchain industry has not yet reached that stage. Don't get us wrong. Cryptocurrency adoption is relatively high and it's definitely a success. However, it is somewhat overshadowed by the pace of ChatGBT adoption. It's important to know that ChatGBT didn't appear overnight and behind the success of AI are several decades of scientific research and, let's face it, a lot of failures and loss of trust across the industry. The blockchain industry may be going through a crypto winter and with it, of course, Cardano. Take it for what it is and focus on what's important. That is, first and foremost, progress in technology.
