In a world where people
can have virtual relationships, it is no surprise that virtual money exists as
well. Virtual money, otherwise known as Bitcoin, is reliant on the blockchain.
The blockchain ensures that Bitcoin remains safe; it makes sure that people can
not erase transactions after completing them.
“ ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had one universal ledger
that we could use for everything and that was accessible to everybody?’ said Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin
Center.” The blockchain is exactly this. The controversy with this, for some
people, is that it is not centralized, unlike other ledgers and databases. Personally,
I believe that it is a good thing that the blockchain is not operated like other ledgers because they are reliant on their owners to operate them. Due to the
lack of centralization, the blockchain accepts direct transfers. This
eliminates the middle man: the bookkeeper.
This past May, Nasdaq stock exchange decided to try the
blockchain for its private-markets platform. This allows companies to trade
private shares. If all goes well in this ‘test run’ for Nasdaq, the blockchain
will be used for other platforms as well. In addition, Nasdaq using the
blockchain gets the word out to other organizations who may benefit from using
the blockchain. Someday, the whole world will be reliant on the blockchain to
keep track of their Bitcoin, among other things.
Not only is the blockchain convenient, but it is also
cheap to operate. This means that not just businesses can benefit for using it;
everyone can. It is believed that someday people who do not possess bank
accounts, will keep track of their money on their smartphones using the
blockchain. Does this mean that someday paper money will no longer exist, and
everyone will just keep track and have their money on their phones and
computers?
Though this article was very informative for people who
already had a basic understanding of what the blockchain is, it lacked a good
explanation of the blockchain. It gave a brief overview of the blockchain, but I
ultimately had to research more to completely understand just how the
blockchain operated. In addition, the article did not clarify that the
blockchain can be used for more than just Bitcoin. It jumped into telling the
reader how companies can use it for trading shares, after first saying that it
was using for Bitcoin. When I first read it I believed that it was solely used
for Bitcoin. The article mentioned how the world could someday benefit from the
blockchain, but it did not provide a good explaination of what the world would
be like when reliant on the blockchain.
The blockchain is a very convenient and cheap way for
Bitcoin, among other things, to be held account for. I cannot wait to see what
future opportunities this technology provides for the world.
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2015/07/01/why-everybody-cares-about-the-blockchain/
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp'
One thing I think you may missed in this post is the ever growing size of the blockchain. After every transaction is completed, the transaction is recorded and verified by one of thousands of nodes around the world; however, a new hash value will always be tacked on to the tail of the blockchain, increasing its size. Now, remember that bitcoins height of popularity so far was in 2013, which has since then dropped significantly; if we were to see a worldwide adoption of blockchain, storage and synchronization speeds will become very big problems. Right now, bitcoin transactions per day top off at a quarter million, just imagine worldwide usage, where there are hundreds of millions if not billions of transactions per day, it is several orders of magnitude larger than today's usage, and may not be able to handle that sort of traffic.
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