One of the focal points of interest in Bitcoin and criptomonedas has its roots in 'blockchain', that technology serves as the foundation of decentralization, security and unchangeable transactions performed in Bitcoin. Thus, this technology is considered as the basis of other applications beyond the cryptoactive with the potential to make these activities much more efficient.
Insurance, games, sports, health, economy, tracking, art, are just some of the areas that blockchain can revolutionize. However, the concept has been blurring in the middle of marketing, losing its original meaning to become an "almighty" technology, private or public, permissible or without permits, of global scope or for a few. Is blockchain a solution for everything?
BLOCK / CHAIN: THE WHITE BOOK OF BITCOIN
In the White Paper or Bitcoin White Paper, origin of the idea of the current blockchains, there is no textual reference to "block chain", but both words are part of the description of the operation of the registration and handling of information in the net. The author (or group of authors), under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, reflected the operation of a network Rescuing to himself timestamping or timestamping devised in computing, as an implementation of cryptography to solve the problem of double spending of the resources of an automated payment system and P2P.
We propose a solution to the problem of double spending using a time stamp server (timestamp server) distributed point to point to generate a computational test of the chronological order of transactions.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin White Paper
This server works with transaction blocks that are sealed with the timestamp and form a chain. "Each timestamp includes the previous time stamp in its hash, forming a chain, with each additional time stamp reinforcing the previous ones," reads the White Paper. However, the word blockchain - which would be a synthesis of the whole process - does not appear in Nakamoto's writing.
HOW THE BLOCK CHAIN WORKS IN BITCOIN
But this element is not enough to guarantee the operation of the network. In fact, Nakamoto takes several elements of computational engineering and code development to create Bitcoin; The chain of blocks and the server of timestamps are not enough to guarantee the good functioning of the cryptocurrency.
In addition to the timestamp server, Bitcoin uses the Work Test to ensure network consensus around the most current state of the block chain it processes. The only way to alter a block that has already been processed is to reprocess it, and with it, the most current chain of network transactions. This consensus scheme also implies an incentive scheme.
Thus, the creation of blocks, the continuation of the system and the fulfillment of all its elements implies an incentive in BTC for network participants. This incentive works to maintain the circulation of bitcoins, to distribute the commissions among the miners of the network and to make sure that the nodes maintain their honesty in their work within the operation of the network.
Timestamp server, chained blocks, consensus and incentives: these four elements are the guarantee that Nakamoto built to ensure decentralization. The use of the word blockchain as a guarantee of this operation not only distorts Bitcoin, but raises a solution that, by itself, is incomplete.
WHAT IS "BLOCKCHAIN"?
At this point there is the question. If in the Nakamoto White Paper and in the practical operation of Bitcoin there is no such thing as a "blockchain", what does blockchain mean? This word is the way in which the functioning and nature of Bitcoin is enhanced regardless of the brand, and what is worse, its necessary relationship with the exchange and flow of value through its network.
Thus, the blockchain technology has been erected as a "disruptive technology", "a revolutionary tool", "a development of great potential". Abstraction names of Bitcoin's performance from its relation to value.
The blockchain technology (as the name of the timestamp server proposed by Nakamoto) alone involves the management of records, organized temporarily in a digital ledger. However, many ecosystem projects use this word as an unambiguous synonym of decentralization, security, inviolability, ensuring that it is a novel and more effective way of carrying out various processes within the operation of companies associated with the areas that we mentioned earlier. before.
The simplification and automation of processes, the elimination of paperwork and transparency are some of the elements that are constantly being used as direct consequences of the application of blockchain technology. This technology has been positioned as a solution to a myriad of problems. Even though it is a marketing banner, it has generated a significant fever and the emergence of a significant number of alleged cases of use. Private blockchains, with permits, with a single node, without cryptocurrencies or tokens. Everything is possible.
Many of these "blockchain solutions" are outlined without specifying in what chain they will develop or if they will implement a chain of their own, the reasons why they require blockchain and not other accounting technology, what kind of consensus the network will use, and the mechanism of incentives to ensure their decentralization, so that businesses and companies initiate blockchain strategies or create blockchain departments to specify the application of this technology although this suggests only the implementation of a database with certain characteristics.
BLOCKCHAIN YES, BITCOIN NO
But one of the worst consequences of the irruption of blockchain technology as something separate, different and superior with respect to Bitcoin has been the position of governments, banks and international institutions that assume that blockchain technology is a historical event, but they completely ignore Bitcoin, coming to criminalize its nature and its use.
Governments of the world have included this technology in their government plan, leaving aside cryptocurrencies, even though these digital assets are the incentives devised for those people who keep the blockchain networks running.
This approach assumes that the administrative processes of a State can be made more sophisticated, efficient and cheap with the implementation of blockchain, although it is generally centralized systems, which are accessed by only a few officials.
In any case, this technology does have use cases for the registration of documents, the shared administration of databases, but it must be emphasized that none of this is foreign to the Bitcoin protocol and that centralization and security distribution features and inviolability are not warranted without the rest of the elements that make up Bitcoin, which, as we have seen, are suppressed in favor of the "almighty" blockchain.