We’re about to enter a new paradigm in humanity and it’s important for you to know about it because it will definitely make you cringe few years down the lane as to why you didn’t get in earlier.
First, let’s start with having a look at how the world has progressed over the last few centuries.
1400 : The printing press filled the knowledge gap, now you could share what you know with the rest of the world by just putting it down on a piece of paper.
Late 1700 : Steam engines filled the power gap/transportation gap, helped us get rid of colonialism, slavery & the inefficient use of manpower.
Late 1800 : Electricity changed how we live our lives in hundreds of new ways.
1990 : The internet changed the way how the communication, information, media & education works. It DECENTRALIZED everything. Now you could google search for any particular piece of information you wanted & have 100’s of results, optimized from top to bottom, to serve you the best.
2008 : Blockchain
What is Bitcoin?
So you want to send a $1000 (~₹ 65,000) from your “ICICI bank” account in India to your friends “Wells Fargo” account in the USA. You initiate the transfer, the information of the transfer is then passed to the corresponding bank which contacts the corresponding bank of the receiving bank and finally, the receiving bank gets the money. The whole process takes around 4–5 days. Meanwhile, if your friend calls his bank to figure out the status of the transaction, they will simply tell you that they haven’t received any update from the other bank and if you call your bank, they will tell you that they have already transferred the money.
Your money is being held by someone for 5 days & there’s nothing you can do about it. But it shouldn’t be this way. It’s your money! It should be always with you! Bitcoin is here to solve this as well as hundreds of other problems we’re facing with the monetary system.
Bitcoin is a decentralized virtual money which can be sent anywhere in the world without a mediator like a bank.
With bitcoin, you can send & receive money, pennies to thousands :
*For almost free (Negligible fee)
*Increased privacy (no need to reveal personal information)
*Securely (encrypted cryptographically)
*Instantly (from seconds to a few minutes)
*Open source (auditable by anybody)
*Worldwide (from anywhere to anywhere on the planet)
*Peer-to-peer (no intermediaries with a cut)
*Public Ledger (transparent, seen by everybody)
*Decentralized (distributed with no single point of failure)
*No chargebacks, No fraud (‘push’ vs’ ‘pull’ transactions).
A lot of major corporations are accepting Bitcoin as a mode of payment like Expedia, Dell, Overstock.
While the bitcoin payment system is exciting and innovative, it is the underlying tech which makes it revolutionary. It’s called the Blockchain.
Entering Blockchain.
The Blockchain is a decentralized database that keeps records of all the digital transactions. Instead of having a central database (banks & governments), a distributed ledger has a network of multiple replicated databases, sync’d via the internet and visible to anyone within the network.So basically blockchain is like a database but isn’t stored on a central server & is publicly accessible. Central servers are prone to hacks, blockchain is in its literal sense, bulletproof!
“Blockchain is to Bitcoin, what the internet is to email. A big electronic system, on top of which you can build applications. Currency is just one.”
Blockchain is the new Internet. The Internet 2.0
What is money?
What is money, exactly? It’s not the ₹2,000 note in your wallet. Those notes don’t have any inherent value, they’re just bits of paper. So why can you buy goods and services with them?
For money to have value, there needs to be a shared agreement on its use as a medium of exchange.
In money’s earliest days, gold or silver was often used to make coins. These coins were different from our modern bills because gold and silver have intrinsic value. However, there was only one reason why these coins functioned as money: the people using them valued gold and silver, and agreed they could be used to buy things. If you traded with a culture that didn’t value gold or silver, your coins were worthless.
Basically, anything can be used as money as long as people are ready to trust it and people are trusting Bitcoins.
But how does the blockchain work?
You can’t create gold at home, you have to work hard finding it and mining it. Bitcoin works in a similar way. They are mined with computers. Computers mine Bitcoins by solving highly complex mathematical problems. Solving these problems requires significant amounts of computational power. When a problem is solved, a Bitcoin reward is given to the miner and a new problem is issued. So the faster your computer, the more likely you are to be rewarded. Every time a new Bitcoin is created, the blockchain is updated. The blockchain is the public record of all transactions ever made in the network. When a new Bitcoin is mined, a new block is created, validated and added to the chain. Just as a bank keeps a careful record of every account balance, there’s a Bitcoin record of all owners’ balances and transactions to ensure the same Bitcoin isn’t spent twice. This is the purpose of the blockchain, which everyone has access to.
The Blockchain is so much more than bitcoin.
Blockchain will change how we TRUST everything. Trust is the basic essence of our everyday life. We trust our banks with our money, we trust our grocery store for the fruits & vegetables, we trust the pharma for the drugs we buy, we trust our government. Do we actually trust them? We don’t! But we have to. We don’t have a choice. What if I tell you, with the help of blockchain, we can remove this need of trust.
“The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it’s not social media. It’s not big data. It’s not robotics. It’s not even AI. You’ll be surprised to learn that it’s the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It’s called the blockchain.” — Don Tapscott
All this wasn’t possible before now because the tech wasn’t advanced enough. Processors were still very slow for their price & most important of all, people weren’t ready for a change this big. But times have changed. The 2008 global economic collapse made people realize that even big financial institutions can fail.
The blockchain isn’t a technology, it’s a revolution. It’ll end the borders, bring people closer & the best part it’ll disrupt hundreds of industries that rely on intermediaries, including banking, finance, academia, real estate, insurance, legal sector, health care and much more.
Look at the graph below. The growth of the technology was all linear till now but since the invention of computers & microprocessors, the graph has taken a tremendous reap. We can’t even imagine what’s going to happen when the advancement in technology becomes exponential but I’m sure it’ll be a better world than the one we live in today.
Whether you agree or not, the blockchain is the future and it is going to change the world. You can be a part of this transformation by educating yourself & the people you care about. The technology is just 8–9 years old. Get in early, be the early adopters. Invest a little, play around. See how it works.
If you any questions or just want to say hi, you can reach me on twitter : https://twitter.com/ze_rusty
Thank you for reading. There’s so much more I wanted to write about but I don’t think I can in a single article.