# Making Blockchain understood for mass adoption

**Published by:** [Malte von Medem](https://paragraph.com/@cryptowally/)
**Published on:** 2022-05-28
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@cryptowally/making-blockchain-understood-for-mass-adoption

## Content

…and helping creatives to come up with use cases / services for ordinary end users beyond payment. Where is this coming from? I used to participate in creating centralized e-commerce and communication platforms (last one in cooperation with GSMA & Google) and I loved doing it. Centralization has always been one of the biggest hazards to natively working and flourishing future digital economic systems to me, down from the very global structure to every single participant. But fair and transparent future platforms by and with the current global players is what we need to not seriously get under the wheels of globalization soon. Wheels where UBI would remain as our last and not really ethical “Soma” resort to keep people silent and away from grabbing their pitchforks. At least I thought so. Then I started digging into blockchain. Many people from my current industry are afraid of wrapping their head around the concept of blockchain right now as it seems too complex, mathematical or plain weird to them. Others argue it will replace the current web as a whole. Both sides keep saying pretty much the same about a potential, future mass adoption trigger. Options for mass adoption For it to happen, we would need: A) (Equally replacing e.g. Amazon or Google) + (technical & philosophical understanding of the new tech by the average user) = (user switching to decentralized platform) or b) (a better alternative with direct benefits) + (a simple metaphor making the upsides of a decentralized platform transparent to the average user) = switching And I believe the same. We will not be able to make users switch back to a decentralized structure from centralized, digital platforms without A) or B). (Yes, back, cause the analog world with all its “Bodegas” or “Tante Emma Laeden (German Bodegas)” was very much decentralized in its economic construct from semantic/logic perspective) A) appears kinda improbable since people are pretty lazy. Not in a negative way, rather always taking the route of the least resistance as in: Amazon Prime = cheapest offer + fastest delivery. It’s human nature (and part of Amazon’s success in this case). So looking at B), I thought: there must be a hack, a trick. There must be a metaphor for regular people to understand the upsides and the true potential of blockchain. So, for B) to work, an intuitively graspable real upside ending up in a clear metaphor for everyone to understand would be of real help. “TrustLESS”, which is often used for this purpose today, still seems a bit too intellectual for the average user to understand in my eyes and from my experience. German “Verbindlichkeit” as a metaphor for future blockchain benefits There is a german term though that I like (and recently used) for the job at hand. It is called: “Verbindlichkeit”. (Feel free to google-translate it — I had a hard time translating it 1:1). It is basically like if a friend or colleague telling you you will meet next Tuesday or that she will definitely deliver the item back to you by a certain date/time and you get the vibe that you can be a hundred percent sure she will do so (or that you will meet). That’s “Verbindlichkeit” and that’s how I love to think about future blockchain use cases and the vibe coming along with it. Examples of “Verbindlichkeit” as label when creating “killer” use cases for blockchain Think: I want to make my **food delivery order **VERBINDLICH (Food delivery via bikes is currently scaling and a big thing in DE, e.g. by Foodora or Deliveroo). But, today it sucks. In many ways. Food arriving too late, poorly cooked, cold or was rejected by the restaurant 1h after you expected your order at your door. No transparency, no “Verbindlichkeit”. So, what I will do now is: I will virtually (concept work) attach a blockchain payment and a “smart contract” (term to be widened for this purpose) to my food order. By smart contract in this case I mean: conditions. Together with a new label in the app like “VERBINDLICH”. What it means is: I pay the full amount for my food (maybe plus 10% for additional incentivation in case EVERYTHING goes premium) and attach conditions to it to be fulfilled. During the cooking and delivery process, whenever a part of the task is fulfilled to my complete satisfaction, a virtual checkmark is set within the smart contract triggering a partly payout to my counterpart on the platform, in this case the rider or the restaurant. Those events could be: 1.) kitchen finishes my food in time (checkmark by kitchen and rider) 2.) rider delivers my food in time (checkmark by rider and me) 3.) food is warm (checkmark by me) 4.) food does not taste bad (checkmark by me) 5.) LOVED the food (checkmark by me -> additional 10% released) If all checkmarks are made, the rider and the kitchen each get their full amount paid (plus 10% eventually). If anything is not to my satisfaction, the payout to the kitchen or the rider gets reduced respectively. I only pay for what I truly receive and rider and kitchen are incentivized to work at their best. Now: Of course there are a ton insufficiencies in this very simple, early stage example. A friend asked me: “Why should a restaurant accept this kind of pressure?” Or: “What if the rider hits a brick on the road, what if the kitchen is overbooked? What if restaurants reject the concept in general?” Of course.** We will need additions to the system to fix these insufficiencies** and incentivize both sides of such a future platform. I could give you my ideas right now (10% plus payment to the restaurant for amazing taste is a very simple one, blocking me from ordering from a certain restaurant for a certain time in case I repeatedly did not check “food tastes good” to lower the price but keep on ordering from them), but this is just a post, not a paper or whitepaper so we’ll leave this one be. It’s not the point right now and it will sure be solved in the future. It’s part of the creative process, of the challenge, of the fun. ;) The point here is much rather the introduction of “Verbindlichkeit” as a concept or label for future functionality and by that: potential mass adoption. In this very food delivery example, blockchain can end the times of blindly “paypaling” some money somewhere and just hoping to get warm, good & timely food in return, replacing it with transparency, quality guarantee and a certain level of control by the enduse. ***A user would be able to get a “verbindlich” guarantee in advance to either receive exactly WHAT he*she paid for by WHEN he*she ordered it ***(even without experience with the order service) OR to get her*his money back. Other examples, clarifying on the label idea “Pfandsysteme” (we have to pay 25c extra with every lemonade or water bottle to make “sure” it is recycled properly in Germany) would be another, maybe boring, but important and intriguing hack-object for the “Verbindlichkeit”-system-paradigm. When I pay 25c extra for a bottle, the system in the background (blockchain) could make sure that at some point this bottle will really be recycled properly and I get the value I paid in the beginning — indicated by a “verbindlich” label on the bottle. **Amazon-Style-E-Commerce **would be a bigger example. With blockchain, I could attach “verbindlich” rules to my payment. Of course convenience-related ones like “delivery in time” or fair return policies, but ALSO, and that is my point, conditions that users personally care about individually, like: “I want my postman to be paid properly”, “I want him to drive an electric car for my delivery” or even: “I want this shirt not to be produced by a poor child in India but either in the US or by a well paid grown up in India”. Checkmark, checkmark, money payout, everything is “verbindlich”, if you remember my explanation above. The user benefit So what’s new in this concept of a “Verbindlichkeit” label? **The USER could actually be sure of (and even set) HER*HIS conditions to be fulfilled during a purchase **and does no longer have to accept the decisions & rules made & set by a central platform player (like Amazon) just to profit from its upsides. He*She would get e.g. the delivery by his*her own terms — and: “VERBINDLICH”. — Thanks for reading. Probably you will make much better and smarter on-point derivations in the future, maybe you will create the “iPhone moment” for blockchain yourself. Maybe “Verbindlichkeit” as a concept can help you do so.

## Publication Information

- [Malte von Medem](https://paragraph.com/@cryptowally/): Publication homepage
- [All Posts](https://paragraph.com/@cryptowally/): More posts from this publication
- [RSS Feed](https://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/@cryptowally): Subscribe to updates