Nick Chirls of Notation Capital raises some good questions about the blockchain

The price of one Ether, the token that runs the Ethereum blockchain, stands at $88 right now, double what it was just one month ago.

Interest in the blockchain and companies that run on the blockchain continues to pick up steam, as evidenced by a recent collaboration between several large banks, consulting companies, and Brooklyn’s ConsenSys LLC, a dev shop of sorts of applications that run on the blockchain.

Nick Chirls of Brooklyn VC fund Notation Capital has some worthwhile thoughts and questions about where the blockchain sits and where it’s headed.

“The Internet was designed as a decentralized system, and yet the most valuable products and services built on top of it are highly centralized, concentrating all of the user data and profits and choke points into a tiny few companies at every layer of the stack (ie. DNS, CDNs, storage and of course applications like Facebook and Uber),” Chirls writes in a Medium post. “If you believe that the blockchain could be a platform to power decentralized versions of every major Internet company today, then this shift could be as big and disruptive as the emergence of the Internet itself.”

He came up with 17 points about the future of blockchain. Here are a few that really got us thinking:

• We think Notation can be particularly helpful for pre-ICO projects because they’re in many ways similar to pre-seed companies.
• Projects will turn out to be either really messy (Matchpool) or flat out scams / hacks (DAO), or will never actually ship a product post-ICO.
• In light of [the above], we’re optimizing for experienced teams with deep technical chops, which we’re starting to see flock to the crypto space.
• There remain significant legal and regulatory risks in crypto, particularly for ICOs.

Sounds like there could be some blockchain investments in Notation’s future.

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