'Pew Pew' Goes the Blockchain - Bloomberg

More on pew-pew industry dynamics

"We talk a lot around here about the blockchain for banking, and one obvious thing about the blockchain for banking is that it goes pew-pew. You can bring senior executives into a room and tell them that you’re upgrading the infrastructure that you use to reconcile trade settlement data with counterparties, and their eyes will glaze over and they will start nodding off, and you can shout “blockchain! blockchain! blockchain blockchain blockchain!” and they will perk up and hand you a stack of money. The blockchain is exciting in ways that improving database architecture is not. (For reasons that are obscure to me, frankly. I get the pew-pew maps! It is cool when you can move things around on giant wall-mounted touch screens. “The blockchain” lacks that sort of tangible sci-fi experience.) 

But the point is that in a modern economy, actually making stuff work is only part of the job. The other part of the job is performing that making-stuff-workiness to customers and executives. If your goal is to hire engineers to write code to protect your accounts from hackers, first you have to hire different engineers to build maps that shoot lasers, and show the laser maps to executives, to convince the executives to give you money to hire the real engineers to do the real work. (It's easy to hire the laser engineers because, one, fake laser maps are fairly commoditized, and two, if you go to your CEO to ask “can I hire an engineer to build a laser map” of course she will say yes because laser maps are awesome.)"

'Pew Pew' Goes the Blockchain - Bloomberg