Don’t disrupt me, bro!

Throughout history, disruptive technologies have often faced resistance from mainstream institutions and established industries until a small group of visionaries are able to create the conditions necessary for widespread disruption.

There are numerous historical examples, from the rejection of the printing press in the 15th century by the church and states to the initial skepticism surrounding automobiles in the 1920s and the internet boom of the late 20th century. These technologies, despite facing initial suppression, ultimately revolutionized communication, education, and business, proving the transformative power of innovation.

I’ve talked about the internet and the printing press at length in past articles, so let’s talk about the automobile.

Cars!

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, automobiles were seen as noisy, dangerous, and threatening the existing way of life. Cities like London enacted laws like the Red Flag Act, which required any motor vehicle to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag to warn bystanders. This law, emblematic of the resistance to automotive technology, was eventually repealed as the societal and economic benefits of automobiles became undeniable. But that took some serious work!

That work was primarily done at Northwestern University in Chicago by a gentleman named Franklin M. Kreml. He is not exactly a household name unless you work in public safety in Chicago, but he looked at the “problem” of automobile safety. Instead of trying to bury the tech, he decided to go against the grain and start the Evanston Police Department “Accident Prevention Bureau” and a traffic science research module at the University to see what made cars dangerous from a behavioral standpoint. This led to the study of the science of ways to make traffic safe through the application of some simple laws, police training, driver training, and establishing standardized logic for things like stop signs, yields, right-of-way, etc. This ultimately led to him being instrumental in creating the Highway Safety Act of 1970 and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. He ended up working for President Eisenhower in the establishment of The National Eisenhower Expressway System and having consulting jobs with every Republican President from Eisenhower until George HW Bush.

Why do I bring this up? Because for a long time, like most disruptive technologies, cars were very dangerous. They were a niche luxury item that was slower, more expensive, and less reliable (sounds like Bitcoin at first, huh?) than a horse until one man saw their long-term value and committed his entire life to fixing the problems. He wrote his first reports on the need for public safety science in the 1920s, and he worked on making traffic safer around the globe until he died in 1998—starting his work in a world that had fewer than 20 million cars on the whole planet and dying as that number approached a billion.

How’s that for ushering in mass adoption?

Oh! And he was my Great Grandfather, and a huge influence on me. Maybe I will write more about it some other time. But having been raised in a family that always talked about putting in hard work to change the world, I internalized his bombastic stories and always thought to myself, “I want to usher in something great, too.”

Bitcoin disruption

Drawing a parallel to the modern era, the BSV blockchain faces similar challenges. Despite its potential to handle over 1 million main net transactions per second through the new Teranode node implementation, BSV blockchain has encountered resistance from mainstream “crypto” advocates and institutions, including influential entities like BlackRock and MasterCard Ventures (NASDAQ: MA) who ruthlessly control the gateways to most of the industry through their proxy organizations. They invested in the BTC blockchain and its derivatives in a controlled, insular economy, and they perceive BSV’s scalability and efficiency as a threat to their established interests in the space—now valued at nearly 2 trillion U.S. Dollars.

The pressure is mounting as, over the last year, Teranode has gone from a pitch deck and some super secret code to an actually functioning testnet—casually pumping out transaction volumes that are orders of magnitude faster than any other blockchain. This will continue to upset the powers that be, but also will pique the interest of anyone who thought blockchain was a novel idea that couldn’t really scale.

BSV blockchain’s journey mirrors that of past disruptive technologies. Despite facing suppression and skepticism, the dedication and hard work of its investors, researchers, developers, and community have begun to showcase its capabilities, potentially positioning BSV blockchain years ahead of other blockchain technologies in terms of scalability and transaction efficiency—all while being laughed at by the mainstream intelligentsia.

As we consider the historical context of technological resistance and eventual acceptance, it becomes clear that disruptive technologies often undergo a period of suppression before their full potential is recognized. The case of the BSV blockchain is indicative of this pattern, suggesting that our persistence in the face of mainstream resistance can eventually lead to widespread adoption and transformation. It’s what I’m here for anyway!

Watch: Teranode is the future of the Bitcoin network