RAYWOOD, Texas. Donna Lee Hightower considers herself an organized person, but the 43-year mother of two will be the first to admit she isn’t perfect. “Don’t open that up,” she says to this reporter of a cabinet in her pantry. “I can’t guarantee you’ll survive.”
Hightower is referring to the extensive collection of mismatched plastic containers and lids she has accumulated over four years in college and eighteen years of marriage, some as gifts and others purchased at “Tupperware” parties, but most saved after their contents–ice cream, potato salad, yogurt, and other assorted comestibles–were consumed. “I don’t worry about global warming,” she says with a wry smile. “The lids alone will kill me long before then.”
But an idle comment by her son Todd, home from his first year at West Texas State Teachers, Agricultural, Mining, Minerals and What-Have-You College caused her to see the chaos of her cupboards in a new light. “Todd told me about blockchain, and he’s gonna spend the summer cleaning things up when he gets his ‘A’ round of financing.”
“Sorry kid, these are no good here.”
The chronic disjuncture between plastic containers and their missing lids is one that is ripe for the robust disruption of blockchain, according to Mike Amarak of Styx River Ventures, Todd’s funder. “Blockchain promises to solve the remaining problems of the world that ‘cloud’ computing and ‘wi-fi’ did not,” he says, making finger quotes in the air to lend an air of deprecation to two recent waves of technological innovation that failed to deliver promised results. “Blockchain is really cool because you get tokens that appear to have intrinsic value, but all you’d get in a liquidation would be something from the prize counter at Chuck E Cheese.”
Under Todd’s proposal, an anonymous exchange would verify ownership of matching lids and containers without an intermediary through the use of cryptography, a term that refers to photographs of dead people. Once verified on a publicly-distributed ledger, transactions would be grouped into “blocks” containing cryptographic “hashes” made of diced or chopped meat and vegetables, which would then be stored in a plastic container after it is sealed.
Next frontier to conquer.
“This is real breakthrough,” says Amarak. “Of course I say that about everything that makes money for me, but this time I mean it.”
With just three months to finish the work before he returns to school, Todd’s mom is concerned he’ll leave his room in a mess when he departs in the fall, but the young man seems blasé about the task that lies ahead of him. “No worries,” he says in the off-putting parlance of today’s youth. “I’m staring a blockchain exchange for my sock drawer called MissingHosiery, LLC.”
They’ve got their work cut out for them.