《互联网vs区块链革命》系列之四：新概念，估值和时机
八维研究院 八维区块链
互联网革命vs区块链革命系列
前言
马克吐温曾经说过：“历史不会重演，但它确实会押韵”。1994年，《连线》杂志的主编凯文·凯利著就了《失控：机器、社会与经济的新生物学》一书，这是关于社会进化、特别是互联网发展的“先知预言”，后来成为《黑客帝国》主演们的必读物。25年后，八维资本试图捕捉互联网和区块链革命之间的相似之处，以帮助人们更好地了解技术生命周期和区块链行业的未来。我们将在接下来的几周内发布一系列文章，欢迎订阅我们的微信公众号。
文章系列，敬请期待：
互联网与区块链革命之：
part1:早期的成功产品
part2:颠覆性公司的起源
part3:早期的挑战
part4:新概念，估值和时机
part5:我们是在1994年吗？ 下一步该怎么办？
互联网与区块链革命：新概念，估值和时机（part4）
作者：Remi Gai @ 八维资本
编译：八维研究院
八维研究院原创，转载请注明出处
本文是整个系列的第四部分：
新兴技术使以前不可能或不实用的新概念和业务模型成为可能。这些新概念和商业模式通常需要时间进行验证，并需要新的评估方法。正如互联网革命，时机对于这些新概念和模式在新兴市场取得成功非常重要。
新概念的出现
随着互联网和区块链的发展而出现的新概念
新技术有潜力创造新的概念和商业模式，从而可以出现新的市场。例如，互联网允许出现诸如 “ 无限选择” 等新概念 （例如：销售来自世界各地的所有书籍的书店 - 亚马逊），或“即时满足” 的概念 （例如：电影）出售来自世界各地的所有电影的租赁商店 - Netflix ） 。 互联网使这些新模式成为可能，亚马逊 或 Netflix 等公司明白消费者的期望正在改变，并专注于改变他们的模式以满足这些新需求。其他一些概念包括“搜索引擎”、“实时信息”、“即时消息”、“社交媒体”、“数字广告”和“流媒体”。尽管我们现在把它们中的许多视为理所当然，但许多这些概念都是从一个想法开始的，需要时间来测试和证明。例如，在早期的互联网时代，杰夫·贝佐斯从一开始就有了“一切商店”的想法，但起初觉得这太夸张了，于是选择把卖书作为概念证明，以验证“电子商务”的商业模式。之所以选择书籍，是因为它们与商品最相似，在商品中，买家知道他们会收到什么，而且利润率相对较高。一旦杰夫·贝佐斯证明了“电子商务”是一种可行的图书商业模式， 亚马逊很快就会扩展到其他垂直领域。
随着新技术的出现，娱乐业的演变
在区块链领域， 随着 Cryptokitties 的推出，2017年底出现的 一个新的挑战概念是“数字稀缺”，它允许您在区块链上拥有Cryptokitties 。在区块链出现之前，完全拥有数字资产的完全所有权不是一个可行的想法，也是迫使传统娱乐业在过去30年内改变其商业模式的一个主要痛点。在互联网时代之前，娱乐业的商业模式严重依赖于CD、磁带、DVD等实物产品的销售。随着互联网的出现，MP3和MP4等新型文件以及对等协议（1999年）的出现，盗版开始猖獗，文件在网上免费获取。由于缺乏数字版权保护和文件所有权工具，传统娱乐业不得不转向一种以体验为导向的模式，即我们今天所知道的，提供诸如 Blockbuster，Netflix 和 Spotify 等服务。如果区块链技术出现在10年前，那么我们今天使用消费数字媒体的方式可能会有所不同。区块链带来的其他一些新概念包括“不可变”、“终局性”、“加密货币”、“效用代币”、“代币管理注册（TCR）”、“去中心化金融系统（DEFI）”和“去中心化自治组织（DAO）”。这些概念目前正被许多激动人心的空间和时间项目所探索，这将验证它们在世界上的价值。
新的估值方法
胖与瘦方案（来自USV的概念，来自JoelMonégro ）
通常，新概念和商业模式的价值一开始很难把握。在互联网的早期，投资者并不确定要对网络公司进行估值，因为他们中的许多公司没有可观的收入，也没有“拥有”任何有形资产（建筑物、卡车、设备等）。例如，许多投资者忽略了这样一个事实： eBay 易趣的价值来源于它的社区，而不是传统的估值方法，同样的，今天最大的互联网公司从他们拥有的用户数据中获取价值。在区块链世界中，大多数初创公司没有任何现金流，其中一些传统的估值方法（如DCF或P/E）不适用。此外，DAPPS的非中介化本质从根本上不允许应用层从其用户那里获取很多价值，并且通常会将价值从用户数据推送到协议层（回到 Fat and Thin Protocol 的概念）。
《连线》杂志的hotwired.com是第一个显示横幅广告的网站（1994年）
新商业模式的可行性在一开始并不总是很明确。在互联网的早期，许多公司开始采用“付费墙”的商业模式，然后逐渐转变为广告模式，因为事实证明它是有效的。数字广告商业模式的发现和推广是 由 Wired 发现并 推广 。1994年，Wired 将其传统的广告模式从他们的杂志复制到了他们的新在线杂志（Hotwired ），这是以前从未在网上尝试过的。有趣的是，在早期的网络时代，很少有网站让人们喜欢点击广告横幅，只是为了浏览其他页面。一旦这种新的商业模式被证明能带来可观的收入，许多公司就走上了这条道路，特别是像雅虎这样的新兴搜索引擎，它们以前一直在努力寻找货币化的途径。25年来，数字广告的市场规模在2018年从零增长到2700亿美元（Statista）。
在加密货币领域，我们看到了与代币经济相关的有趣的新模型。例如，协议和实用令牌开发人员可以通过保留一些最初生成的令牌来为自己创造价值。然后，收入取决于基于市场采用、需求和投机的代币价格变化。虽然从分权的角度来看，这种模式是有意义的，在这种情况下，这对于中间商获取价值的机会理应删除或从系统最小化，但这些项目所承担的风险相当大，因为它们的成功将完全取决于它们的“一次性”铸造代币的成功，在部署后没有机会进行重大业务模式更改。其他一些有趣的新商业模式还包括由交易所 FCoin 首创的模式，该模式试图通过奖励交易用代币（即“交易即采矿”模式）来解决交易所的流动性问题，而不是像大多数交易所或社交媒体平台Steemit 那样收取费用，并允许他们 在用户使用他们的代币时获得相关信息。总的来说，我们很高兴看到新的代币和商业模式出现在这个空间。
UTXO分析和市场周期 （来源： Delphi Digital ）
为了评估加密货币的价格，我们已经看到了新的估值方法，例如网络价值与交易（NVT）比率，它衡量加密资产交易活动相对于网络价值的美元价值（由 Willy Woo 和 Chris Burniske 推广），或者utxo分析（来自 Unchained Capital 的概念 ），这与从比特币交易到价格的未消耗产出。这两种方法都是提供新框架来解释在熊市和牛市周期中比特币的价值的方法。然而，在评估协议令牌价值的正确方法上，仍然存在许多问题。价值是否应基于区块链顶部构建的DAPP数量及其各自的用户群？还是应该以他们提供的总计算资源为基础（例如，以太坊中的GAS可以被视为矿工提供的计算能力，或者，如果是 FileCoin ，则视为存储能力）？一般来说，由于我们仍处于区块链革命的早期周期，因此没有标准化框架来评估区块链、DAPP和加密货币的价值。
时机
互联网革命：市场、基础设施和公司的演变
回顾互联网时代的主要应用程序是如何推出的，新技术的先驱者很少能够存活足够长的时间来主宰他们的类别：通常情况下，它仍然是我们今天的模仿者：搜索领域的谷歌，而不是 Altavista 或 雅虎 ；社交网络领域的 Facebook ，而不是 Friendster 或MySpace。在科技界，一个新想法的最终成功在很大程度上取决于时机。第一款互联网浏览器 Mosaic 的成功，正是它成为为该领域早期推动者的时机。NCSA快速的电脑和互联网连接使马克·安德烈森和地下室的其他孩子们能够在网络起飞前，完美地捕捉到网络的浪潮。
即使是看起来是伟大想法也可能无法兑现承诺，因为底层技术或基础设施还不够成熟，无法支持其采用和可行性。例如，在互联网早期，媒体流是一个很受欢迎的想法，在互联网上，broadcast.com（由Mark Cuban于1995年创建的互联网广播公司）获得了成功，但当时其他试图提供视频相关服务的公司却失败了。YouTube（2004年）起飞，就需要发展宽带互联网连接，同时采用消费者视频和手机摄像头，以及 Napster 失败后的版权侵权教训（第一个因版权侵权而关闭的点对点文件共享服务），这几乎发生在10年后。Facebook（2004年）也获得了采用智能手机的时机，随时都提供了一种更为个性化和紧密的互联网体验。如果iPhone没有启动智能手机革命，哪来的 Instagram，Snapchat，Twitter 和 Uber ？它是社交媒体消费和生产所需的完美工具。一些人认为，社交媒体最终成为主流，因为智能手机在同一时间成为主流——两者在适当的时候互补。在区块链领域，DAPP的主流采用将在很大程度上取决于技术和基础设施的成熟度，这些成熟度可以允许一些用例的可行性和可扩展性。一些想法可能在未来几年内可行和实用，而其他想法可能需要5-10年。
总之，新兴技术允许出现新的概念和商业模型，从新的估值角度对它们进行评估是很重要的，因为以前的方法可能不适用。这些新概念中的许多需要时间来验证，它们的采用与时间密切相关。
后记
马克吐温曾经说过“历史不会重演，但它确实会押韵”。 我们试图在互联网和区块链革命之间勾勒出一些相似之处，以帮助公众更好地了解技术的生命周期。请留下您的想法和评论，希望本系列文章将为行业提供一些有价值的观点。
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/
https://coinmetrics.io/nvt/
https://www.delphi digital.io/utxo
http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols
英文版：Internet vs Blockchain Revolution Series
Introduction
Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. At 8 Decimal Capital, we are attempting to find similarities between the Internet and Blockchain revolutions, to help the community better understand technological life cycles and the future of the Blockchain industry. The Internet Revolution facts are based on the book “How the Internet Happened”, written by Brian McCullough. We will be releasing a series of articles over the next couple of weeks. Feel free to subscribe to our medium channel to stay up to date with our new posts, in which we will regularly share our findings and insights.
Article Series:
Internet vs Blockchain Revolution:
Early Successful Products (Part 1)
Origins of Disruptive Companies (Part 2)
Challenges in the Early Days (Part 3)
New Concepts, Valuations, and Timing (Part 4)
Are We in 1994? What to expect Next? (Part 5)
New Concepts, Valuations, and Timing（Part 4）
Author：Remi Gai @ 8 Decimal Capital
Edition:8 Decimal Research
This article is the fourth part of the Internet vs Blockchain Revolution Series.
Emergent technologies enable new concepts and business models that werenot possible or practical before. These new concepts and business models oftentake time to be validated and require new methods of valuation. As the InternetRevolution has shown us, timing is very important for these new concepts andmodels to succeed in emerging markets.
The Emergence of New Concepts
New concepts that appearedwith the development of the Internet and Blockchain
New technologieshave the potential to create new concepts and business models, allowing for newmarkets to emerge. For example, the Internet allowed for the emergence of newconcepts such as “unlimited selection”(ex: a book store that sells all the books from around the world - Amazon), or the concept of “instantgratification” (ex: a movie rental store selling all the movies from around theworld - Netflix). The internet madethese new models possible, and the companies such as Amazon or Netflixunderstood that consumers’ expectations were changing and focused on shiftingtheir model to satisfy these new demands. Some other concepts include “searchengine”, “real-time information”, “instant messaging”, “social media”, “digitaladvertising” and “streaming”. Although we take many of them for granted nowadays,a lot of these concepts started as an idea and needed time to be tested andproven over time. For example, during the early Internet, Jeff Bezos had the idea of the “everything store” from thebeginning but thought it was too grandiose at first and chose to focus onselling books as a proof of concept to validate the business model of“e-commerce”. Books were chosen because they are most similar to a commodity,in which the buyers knew what they would be receiving, and had a relativelyhigh margin. Once Jeff Bezos hadproven himself that “e-commerce” could be a viable business model with books, Amazon quickly expanded into otherverticals.
Evolution of theentertainment industry with the emergence of new technologies
In the blockchainspace, a new fascinating concept that emerged towards the end of 2017 with theintroduction of Cryptokitties was“digital scarcity”, which allowed you to own digital cats on the blockchain.Having complete ownership of a digital asset wasn’t a feasible idea before theexistence blockchain, and was a major pain point that forced the traditionalentertainment industry to shift their business model over the past 30 years.During the pre-Internet era, the entertainment industry had a business modelheavily dependent on the sales of physical products such as CDs, cassettes,vinyles and DVDs. With the emergence of the Internet, new type of files such asMP3 and MP4, and the peer to peer protocol (1999), piracy started to flourish,and files became free for grabs online. The lack of digital copyrightprotection and file ownership vehicle forced the traditional entertainmentindustry to shift into an experience-oriented model that we know today, withservices such as Blockbuster, Netflix, and Spotify. If blockchain technology appeared 10 years earlier,perhaps the way we consume digital media today would have been different. Someother new concepts that came with blockchain include “immutability”,“finality”, “cryptocurrency”, “utility tokens”, “Token Curated Registry (TCR)”,“Decentralized Financial System (DeFi)”, and “Decentralized AutonomousOrganization (DAO)”. These concepts are currently being explored by manyexciting projects in the space and time will validate their value in the world.
New Valuation Methods
Fat vs Thin Protocol (a concept from USV, by Joel Monégro)
Often, the value ofnew concepts and business models are hard to grasp at first. Back in the earlydays of the Internet, investors were not sure on to put a valuation on dot-comcompanies, as many of them didn’t have significant revenues and didn’t “own”anything physical (buildings, trucks, equipment etc.). For example, manyinvestors missed the fact that the value of eBaywas derived from its community instead of the traditional valuation method, inthe same way, that today’s largest Internet companies are deriving their valuefrom the user data they own. In theblockchain world, most of the startups don’t have any cash flow, in which someof the traditional valuation methods such as DCF or P/E does not apply.Additionally, the disintermediation nature of dapps fundamentally doesn’t allowfor the application layer to capture much value from its users, and oftenpushes the values from user data to the protocol layer instead (going back tothe idea of Fat vs Thin Protocol).
Wired magazinesHotWired.com was the first website to display banner ads (1994)
The viability ofnew business models is not always clear at the beginning. During the early daysof the Internet, many companies started with a “paywall” business model thengradually shifted into an advertisement model as it proved to be working. Thedigital advertising business model was discovered and popularized by Wired. In 1994, Wired replicated its traditional advertising model from theirmagazines to their new online magazine (Hotwired),which was something never attempted previously on the web. Interestingly duringthe early web period, there were so few websites that people even enjoyedclicking on advertisement banners, just to explore other pages. Once this newbusiness model was proven to generate significant revenue, many companiesfollowed this path, especially the emergent search engines, such as Yahoo, which previously struggled tofind a way for monetization. In 25 years, the market size of digitaladvertising grew from nothing to $270B worldwide in 2018 (Statista).
In thecryptocurrency space, we have seen interesting new models tied to tokeneconomics. For example, protocol and utility token developers can create valuefor themselves by retaining some of the initially minted tokens. The revenue isthen dependent on the price inflection of the tokens based on its adoption,demand, and speculation by the market. While this model makes sense from thedecentralization perspective, in which the opportunity for middlemen to capturevalue is supposedly removed or minimized from the system, the risks taken bythese projects are fairly large as their success would be solely dependent onthe success of their “one-time” minted tokens, without the chance of makingmajor business model changes after deployment. Some other interesting newbusiness models include the one pioneered by the exchange Fcoin, which attempted to solve the problem of exchange liquidityby rewarding tokens for trading (the model of “trading is mining”) instead ofcharging fees like most exchanges, or the social media platform Steemit, rewarding users for the contentthey produce and allowing them to gain exposure on the platform if the usersstake their tokens. Overall, we are excited to see new token and businessmodels appear in the space.
UTXO Analysis and MarketCycles (Source: Delphi Digital)
For assessing theprice of cryptocurrencies, we have seen new valuation methods such as TheNetwork Value to Transactions (NVT) ratio, which measures the dollar value ofcrypto asset transaction activity relative to network value (popularized by Willy Woo and Chris Burniske), or the UTXO Analysis (concept from Unchained Capital), which correlates theunspent output from bitcoin transactions to price over time. Both areinteresting ways to provide new frameworks to explain the value of Bitcoin during bear and bull marketcycles. However, many questions still remain on what would be the right way toassess the value of protocol tokens. Should the value be based on the number ofdapps built on the top of the blockchain, and their respective user base? Orshould it be based on the total computational resources they provide (forexample, gas in Ethereum can be seen as computational power offered by the miners,or storage power in the case of FileCoin)?Generally, as we are still in the early cycle of the blockchain revolution,there are no standardized frameworks for evaluating the value of blockchains,dapps, and cryptocurrencies.
Timing
Internet Revolution: theevolution of the market, infrastructures, and companies
Looking back at howthe major applications from the Internet era rolled out, pioneers of newtechnologies are rarely the ones who survive long enough to dominate theircategories: often, it is the copycat that are still with us today: Google, not AltaVista or Yahoo, insearch; Facebook, not Friendster or MySpace, in social network. In the technology world, the ultimatesuccess of a new idea is very much dependent on timing. What led to the success of Mosaic,the first Internet browser was the timing for becoming an early mover inthe space. NCSA’s fast computers andinternet connections allowed MarcAndreessen and the other kids in the basement to be perfectly positioned tocatch the wave of the Web right before it took off.
Even great ideasthat seem to be the next big thing can fail to deliver on their promise becausethe underlying technology or infrastructure isn’t mature enough yet to supportits adoption and viability. For example, media streaming was a popular ideaduring the early Internet in which Broadcast.com(Internet radio company created by MarkCuban in 1995) became successful, but other companies trying to providevideo related services at the time failed. For Youtube (2004) to take off, it required the development ofbroadband Internet connections, combined with the adoption of consumer videoand cell phone cameras, and the copyright infringement lessons from Napster’s failure (first peer-to-peer file sharing service that was shut down due tocopyright infringements), which almost happened 10 years later. Facebook (2004) also got the timingright on the adoption of smartphones, which provided a more personal andintimate experience of the Internet at any moment. Where would Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Uber be if the iPhone didn’t start the smartphone revolution? It was the perfectvehicle needed for social media consumption and production. Some would arguethat social media finally became mainstream because smartphones went mainstreamat the same time - both complemented each other at the right moment. In theblockchain space, the mainstream adoption of dapps will be very much dependenton the maturity of the technology and infrastructure that can allow forviability and scalability of some use cases. Some ideas could be viable andpractical in the next few years, and others could take 5-10 years.
In conclusion,emergent technologies allow for new concepts, and business models to appear andit’s important to evaluate them from new valuation angles, as the previousmethodologies might not be applicable. Many of these new concepts take time tobe validated, and their adoption are closely tied to timing.
-----
Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. We are attempting to draw some similarities between the Internet and Blockchain Revolutions, to help entrepreneurs and investors better understand technological life cycles. Please leave your thoughts and comments below, and hope this article series will have provided some valuable perspectives about the Blockchain industry.
Sources:
“How the Internet Happened”, written by Brian McCullough
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/
https://coinmetrics.io/nvt/
https://www.delphidigital.io/utxo
http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols
八维研究院出品的其他研究
