The idea of creating something with a business model in mind has fallen out of favor in recent years. Instead, it’s far better to build something and then figure out how to monetize it. Facebook, now highly profitable, lost $59 million in 2011 before it figured out exactly how it could make money through advertising. Twitter only just made its first profit in its 12 years. It’s not just social media — one app, Springpad, had 5 million consumers using its Evernote-like features. But after building its user base, it failed to create a business model and folded.
The “move fast and break things” attitude means building things and figuring out how they make money later. Recently, the excitement over the possibilities of blockchain has combined with this to create some promising and crazy ideas[1] – blockchain for copyright, blockchain for music distribution, blockchain smartphones, and blockchain for identity[2]. This last idea has many potential benefits for consumers, but a lack of a solid business model to accompany these innovations often means the idea is dead on arrival.
The case for blockchain
In recent years, blockchain has increasingly become a hype bandwagon — a solution in search of problems to fix. But with identity, there are advantages to blockchain that may be genuinely useful and not just gimmicks.
By decentralizing identity, the possibility of people controlling their own identity credentials — rather than having them controlled by a central authority — becomes reality. The so-called “self-sovereign” identity means that consumers have control over what they share. For example, content that is age-gated can be accessed simply by sharing a date of birth, while more
