‘Blockchain is the most exciting and the most overrated technology’
(#AnIdeaADay with Chris Castiglione.)
Castiglione is the co-founder (along with Mattan Griffel) of OneMonth.com which teaches students programming — from JavaScript to Python — in just one month or around 20 hours. He also teaches technology at the Columbia University business school. Castiglione is renowned as an innovator in making technology accessible to the widest possible range of people and in this interview with Grin he talks about, among other things, the future of paper money and why he thinks Blockchain is both the most exciting tech of the future and perhaps the most over-hyped.
- What is the most important lesson that you have learnt in your journey as an entrepreneur?
Take a risk. Allow yourself to feel uncomfortable, to fail, and to learn from the your failures. What’s an example of a risk? I use “risk” loosely to mean: push yourself out of your comfort zone, and stay hungry to try new things in life. Especially if you think you might not succeed at first, that’s interesting. A risk could learning something new (e.g taking an improv class), or cold-emailing someone you admire to get in touch (even though you’re “certain” they won’t return your email).
I can trace most of my small wins as being a combination of hard work, and a willingness to take a risk. For example, that’s how I met my co-founder before starting One Month. We risked our free-time to brainstorm new product ideas, we took the risk of showing our ideas to people, and then took the risk of quitting and giving up our salaries to go full-time. There were hundreds of failures along the way — but the more risks you take then the more chips you have on table. It all adds up.
2. If there is one basic thing that everyone should learn to attain at least some base level of digital literacy what is it?
Learn to code. You don’t need to become a software developer, but the ability to understand logic, and absorb tech vocabulary will give you such huge advantage. If you never learn to code then terms like APIs, Blockchain, databases, and servers are all just abstract word jumbles — even with only 2–3 months of casual learning you’ll see the world in a different way.
3. What is the technological change — current or upcoming — that is exciting you the most?
Blockchain. I’m especially interested blockchain’s use for social impact. Recently I’ve seen a handful of blockchain proposals to improve transparency in the social impact space from life cycle analysis (e.g. Following the production materials from cradle to grave), ownership (e.g. Real estate property in third-world countries), voting (Mitigating issues with voter fraud), and lowering the cost of remittance.
4. What is the technological change — current or upcoming — which you think is overrated?
Blockchain again. There’s a lot of noise in the blockchain space. Many people are using blockchain where a database will suffice. There’s also a lot of blockchain hype around ICOs, my guess is that 90% of them will disappear within the next few years. The blockchain hype reminds me of the startup hype of the past decade — there’s money to be had, and therefore everyone with an idea is launching a blockchain company.
5. Since you teach at the Columbia business school, we would like to know your views on cash: do you believe that we are seeing the first signs of a world slowly going (paper) cashless? Or will some paper cash always remain?
In 20 years, I believe we will still have cash, but it will be more like how we still have landlines, carbon paper, and CDs. Technologies don’t easily go extinct.
At this moment, only 10% of money in the world is physical money. That means that if everyone in America went to the bank tomorrow, and asked, “Can I take out all my money in dollar bills?” the bank would say “Nope!” because they don’t have that amount of money to give.
In the future we’ll have digital streaming money, it will be quicker and more efficient than physical dollar money.
Likely the final blow to cash will be when the cost to maintain security, and minting of money greatly exceeds digital cash. Which will eventually happen since digital is free to copy. You may have heard that the penny right now costs more to make than it’s worth (something like 1.6 cents just to make a penny)? At what point is this unsustainable. Or if a global currency like bitcoin becomes as international as Mastercard is today — that may incentivise nations from backing such a large amount of fiat currency as they are doing at the moment.
I’m not an economist, but from a technological point of view: everything that technology touches moves towards being more free, and abundant. Physical money will follow, and yes it’s already beginning.
6. What is the one trend in technology that most people are missing out on — and how is it likely to transform our lives?
Exponential growth. I’ve come to the realization that most people don’t understand the world we currently live in, and therefore, through that lens it’s nearly impossible to see or calculate the importance of the innovations immediately ahead of us. Our rate of technological progress is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s possible that at some point in the next twenty years progress will double leaving behind many jobs opening up what has been referred to as a ‘useless class.’ Not only unemployed, but unemployable.
Many jobs will be replaced by algorithms — I’m pretty sure we’re all aware of truck and bus drivers going away due to self-driving cars? Once we’re accustomed to a self-driving car driving us around town, waiters, bankers, and other service industry folk could be next. There’s a paper out of Oxford worth checking out called the “The Future of Employment”.
I think those of us who are learning everyday, investing time in reading, and trading knowledge with people smarter than themselves will have the best chance at succeeding. Actually, I can imagine a class divide where a small percentage of people benefit exponentially, while the long tail of most people don’t understand the trend until way to late. Perhaps you could say this is what is happening, one example that comes to mind is the new blockchain protocols where some investors have seen 25,000% returns, an unprecedented amount of growth has been captured for those who were capable of understanding the innovation.
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