Blockchain and the Insufferable Millennial

I went to the in Los Angeles on January 24, 2018, and while it was sparsely attended, there were a lot of good speakers and a number of interesting vendors exhibiting and giving their ICO pitch.

I was there representing one of the professional big name publications that I write for (I’m not going to put the name, because I’m going to get a bit controversial here) and I made it a point to talk to each vendor at the event to find out what they were doing, hear about their use case, play a little devils advocate to get them to justify their utility and reason for doing this. I had wonderful conversations with all the companies, great people, some of the ideas made a lot of sense, a few were going to totally crash and burn in my opinion. There were about 5 companies there that had something to do with medical information in one way or another. One of them was the last company I talked to, and I’m not going to post their name, because I don’t want to give them any free promotion, but the young man and woman in their booth were the absolute worst people I have ever encountered at any kind of trade show in decades of going to trade shows across sporting goods, music and technology. These two people appeared to be in their early to mid 20’s and dressed with plenty of flair. I didn’t get their names, so I’ll refer to them in this conversation re-enactment as Douchebag Millennial Male (DMM) and Fawning Millennial Female (FMF):

SG: Hi, I’m with ****** Magazine, tell me about what you’re doing here.

DMM: Putting medical records on the blockchain.

SG: Cool, so give me some details, do you have partnerships already? How do the records get on there? Do I, as a patient explicitly do it, or give permission to my provider to do it or they do it without me knowing?

DMM: Yes.

SG: Yes what?

DMM: To all of it.

SG: Ok, can you give me some details? Walk me through it.

DMM: With our system, you can get to your medical records anywhere in the world at any time.

SG: Ok, nice, but that wasn’t really an answer to my questions. Why is there a need for your token?

DMM: To get instant access to your personal records at any time.

SG: Ok, so I’m a regular Joe and I want to get to my medical records. Are you saying that I have to install your mobile app, open a crypto exchange account, take pictures of my ID and send that to them and wait to get validated, then get my bank account connected to the exchange, send my money in, buy your token, get some sort of wallet integration, and then I can get my medical records?

DMM: Yes, it sounds very simple to me.

SG: Are you being serious right now?

DMM: For sophisticated millennials, this is trivial, we all already live like this.

SG: Let me give you a little advice, your style of delivery isn’t particularly pleasant and is going to alienate people.

DMM: That’s your opinion.

FMF: Yea, that’s just your opinion.

SG: You realize that if even a small number of companies are successful at all these tokens out of the number that are trying, it will require the average person to walk around with thousands of different cryptocurrencies to perform their daily tasks?

DMM: No, that won’t happen and it doesn’t matter to us.

SG: <laughs a lot> Ok guys, I’m gonna just leave you out of my article because you are so unpleasant and you are making me play 20 questions to find out any details and you have been very insulting. <starts to walk away after leaving materials on their table>

FMF: <yells at my departing back> OH YEA? WELL, THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP!!!

SG: <laughs even harder>

The rest of the conference was overall very interesting and enjoyable. Tip to millennials, this is not a winning strategy.