Isaac Morehouse covers building breakthrough companies in ‘Tiny Payments are a big deal’ part 3

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This article summarizes part three of a video series by Isaac Morehouse called “Tiny Payments are a Big Deal.” In it, he covers why the micro and nano payments made possible by Bitcoin SV are world-changing.

A framework for building breakthrough companies

Isaac begins this video by recalling an idea inspired by venture capitalist Mike Maples on building breakthrough companies that change the game.

The first idea is to identify an inflection point (or multiple inflection points) and to think back from where we’ll be in 10 years and what we can build now to prepare for that.

“You work backward from different futures,” Isaac says. The idea is to think of different possible futures; likely, less likely, and preposterous, and then make bets on each outcome.

Identifying inflection points

The key to building breakthrough companies is to find inflection points and move quickly to take advantage of them. Isaac outlines four inflections that people looking to build breakthrough companies should look for: 

• Technology Inflections – Accelerating changes in technology which can have profound effects. Some examples could be the internet, mobile phones, genetic editing, and some others.
• Adoption Inflections – Accelerating changes in the adoption of technology. For example, smartphones. Identifying this trend early could allow one to build a business and be ready for it.
• Regulatory Inflections – When regulations are going to change things in a big way. E.g., interstate deregulation of telemedicine opening up new opportunities for medical services. Another example would be the end of alcohol or marijuana prohibition.
• Belief Inflections – Widespread changes in beliefs. For example, people are beginning to believe that large, centralized social media companies are not good. Another example would be generational beliefs; older generations would never have jumped in for a ride with a stranger, and so Uber would not have worked. However, in the younger generation, this is not a problem.

How this all relates to tiny payments

Isaac notes that the ability to make tiny payments was there when Bitcoin was released. However, this ability was stripped away, and various altcoins reintroduced tiny payments with varying degrees of success.

With the restoration of the Bitcoin protocol through BSV, Isaac believes that the tiny payments cat is now fully out of the bag. He believes that very few people in ‘crypto’ are paying attention to this right now. It will soon hit an inflection point, and the applications will be built to enable tiny payments to be made easily for different purposes.

Using the example of video streaming, Isaac referred to Netflix. It saw the streaming of videos coming long before many others. It started with DVD by mail, collected data, and then waited for broadband speeds to catch up. They already had a huge subscriber base thanks to the DVD subscription business and the data they had accumulated. They positioned themselves to be ahead of the curve so that when adoption inflection and technology inflection met, they were there to win the market.

Where we are with tiny payments inflection points

So, where are we with tiny payments? Isaac believes that most people at the moment assume things are going to stay the same. For example, Software as a Service (SaaS) based on monthly subscriptions are seen as the in thing right now, but Isaac believes they are losing steam to some degree and may lose out to tiny payments. This could happen to various degrees; tiny payments could challenge some elements of these business models, could destroy some of them, or things could get truly preposterous, and we could end up living in a radically different world fueled by tiny payments everywhere.

After you’ve imagined various possible futures, the next idea is to build tools to take advantage of and help bring them about. 

“Can I be a part of bringing that into play, of bringing that inflection point, and winning when it occurs?” Isaac asks. He emphasizes the need for practitioners to build things as well as those who imagine the various possible futures.

Thinking about what to build to take advantage of tiny payments

In part two of the series, Isaac stripped away many things about Bitcoin that were oversold. He concluded that of all the initial promises of Bitcoin, tiny payments are the biggest breakthrough. After thinking deeply about it, he concluded that tiny payments are the most likely to change the world in extreme ways.

“If bits of data are tied to bits of exchangeable value, the whole architecture of the internet could be rewritten,” Isaac stated.

Wrapping up, Isaac tries to imagine what the world could look like when tiny payments really take off and challenges us to begin to imagine how we can build tools and breakthrough companies that utilize them and what the world might look like if tiny payments were widely adopted.

Watch: CoinGeek New York presentation, Micropayments for the World: APIs, Tokens and Computation