I don’t know about you, but lately my Instagram feed has been bombarded by MLM marketing material. Turns out, this 2020 pandemic has been a fertile breeding ground for them because of people’s craving for alternative income.

Blockchain is one of the most misunderstood technology that exists right now. On one end, blockchain is one of those tech words that has been mythified to be a world-changer: a tool that can solve poverty, world hunger, and other grandeur things. It’s easy to get caught in the marketing hype and get a non-accurate, sugarcoated idea of it. On the other end, some people think blockchain is “just a linked-list” and has no use cases outside of cryptocurrency. While both extremes have some kernel of truth, I think that there should be an elaboration to be made to truly understand the potential and limitation of the technology.

How should I live my life?

Due to its bureaucratic inertia, the banking business has to be one of the slowest sectors to adapt to new technologies. While new flashy gizmos do exist, especially payment technologies (e.g. Apple Pay, Android Pay, Visa PayWave, cryptocurrencies, and in Indonesia there are TCash, e-money cards, and countless other small startup stuffs), the consumer banking experience stays roughly the same: to be able to use the bank’s services, you often still have to go to a physical building and hassle with the paperwork and the queue. While majority of the banks have some kind of online services, they mostly function like a cashless ATM that can only do a simple send and receive transaction. Not exactly a thing that you would call ‘innovative’.

As someone who watches the tech industry, I cannot escape the famous “what phone should I buy?” question given to me by the people around me. Then, as time goes by, I realized that it’s getting harder and harder to even find a bad phone. Years ago, there’s a clear and distinct class division of phones in a company’s lineup. The top flagship phone has all the feature that you can imagine: cameras, colored high resolution screen, email and browser, Office file reader, and occasionally, a funky and radical design. As you traverse down the series, you’ll end up with the basic, lower-end phones: monochrome screen, GSM only connection, plastic design, and a beeper speaker. Back then, low-end phones are astronomically inferior to the flagship and there’s a somewhat clear spectrum of goodness. However, as of today, that gap has been vanished, or at least greatly blurred.