The ever-increasing acceptance of the concept of the Value Web is bringing forth an interesting example in the disjointed developmental chronology that always attaches itself to anything disruptive in nature.

For the sake of this piece, let’s call it the Awareness, Acceptance, Acceleration paradigm.

We can all agree that distributed ledgers have been around for a long time – some would point to the Assyrians in the 25th Century B.C. But we can comfortably use the development of BitCoin as the logical starting point of Awareness.

When BitCoin’s technology became fully understood in certain sections of the market, it was looked at in a variety of ways. The insightful and fast on their feet immediately seized on its viability and applications. The more prudent and conservative acknowledged its potential but reserved judgment, and everyone else just took a look and went on their way.

But now we have a far different tableau. Everyone – even the cynical – will accede to its benefits. The central banks and larger trade associations still want time to study it; many people are using it and the nimble Fintech players are already galloping merrily down the road, designing advanced applications or improving on extant methodologies. Hence, Acceptance.

And that brings us to Acceleration, which is most certainly taking place at a “speed of knots”. The other day at an interesting workshop of Long Finance, the participants were asked to brain storm what they saw for the future. And what they came up showed the degree to which anything disruptive can permeate throughout not just a specific market but the larger society as well.

Among the observations were:

• The proliferation of participants in the block chain space will result in added pressure on existing financial service firms, regulators and extant payment channels.
• The need for entirely different thinking and organization by regulators to ensure the soundness of the system.
• The security challenges, not as they pertain to soundness of the system more about illegal use of block chain to facilitate the movement of arms, drugs and “dirty money.”
• The positive impact of the rapid movement of money in terms of emerging market remittance flows and micro finance.
• The disruption to the work force. Those currently in back office positions involving payments, clearing and settling will have to be retrained to master the new technologies inherent in these systems.
• Tax mitigation as practiced by larger corporations will undergo significant changes as a distributed ledger will make it tougher to selectively choose booking locations for revenues. Consequently, tax authorities will be challenged to come up with new, perhaps regionalized, approaches.

Those were just a few of the thoughts generated about where the Value Web is ultimately headed.

From all of that though, there are some general observations that can be made.

• The Triple A paradigm is never smoothly sequential. It moves in ways that appear highly disjointed from afar, but actually have a logical flow when viewed more closely.
• There are few things new under the sun in terms of this chronology. The Luddites were still burning down textile mills while the country changed its industrial footing and the internet was into its second decade before people were convinced it was here to stay.
• And finally, it will be convenient to think that the wide-scaled adoption hinges on regulatory clearance and market acceptance by the big players. That may be true to a point, but the competitive pressures of those who already have the bit in their teeth and are half way around the track will be an equally -- if not greater – reason for the world as we know it to change.