Ben Thompson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think there’s any? I don’t know. Blockchain is inherently interesting because the thing about the internet is its reduction in — basically driving distribution cost to zero. But tied into that is the end of scarcity because anything can be copied endlessly. That’s great. It’s bad for a lot of businesses; it’s great for other businesses. But what makes blockchain–derived products interesting is, they can have that zero-distribution-cost aspect — obviously varying on the fees and whatnot, but theoretically — while also being scarce. That’s a really interesting concept of being able to basically go over the whole entire world, yet there be only one of every particular item. That’s fundamentally interesting, so I would not dismiss it outright. I don’t know how that’s actually going to manifest itself in the real world. But the thing to remember is, every time there’s a new paradigm that comes along, everyone starts out trying to copy what came before, but in the new format. When the internet came along, everyone slapped ads next to the articles because that’s the way they did it in the newspapers. Obviously that didn’t work, but you see this again and again and again. It’s the second wave that figures out what is native to the format. In the case of digital advertising, it’s putting it in the feed where it’s an ongoing stream of information that you can inject ads into — only possible on digital, tremendously profitable. With blockchain-type companies, the initial wave is all trying to recreate stuff that already pretty much works. The key is going to be figuring out stuff that’s not possible, but is uniquely possible with blockchain. If I knew what that was, then maybe I wouldn’t be writing a newsletter every day. Will Amazon have any impact on healthcare? As you know, there’s a new initiative.…

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