Bitcoin and blockchain technology have the potential to revolutionize the way we think about money, transactions and online identity. Let’s dive in.
Here are the topics we will explore:
Origins of Bitcoin
How Does Blockchain Work?
Bitcoin Investment and Mining
Real-Life Business Applications
A Future with Bitcoin
Origins of Bitcoin
In 2009, an unknown individual under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the first proof of concept for Bitcoin technology. To this day, his identity remains a secret, but his project became for currency what the printing press was for books. As business technology expert, Don Tapscott, puts it, “blockchain [and Bitcoin] technology facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without any intermediary such as a bank or governing body.”
After Satoshi left the project in 2010, it was taken over by developers and became open-source code that is publically viewable and able to be modified by anyone. This decentralized development came after the financial crash of 2008, which created a fundamental distrust of a centralized economy. Below is an excerpt from Satoshi's original whitepaper:
What Are Bitcoins?
So, what exactly are Bitcoins? Bitcoins are not merely currency; they are units of accounting for anything you program them to be. One Bitcoin can be broken into 100,000,000 individual pieces, each programmable into specific units of currency, stock or almost anything else you can imagine. There is a published ledger of Bitcoin transactions that are published to a distributed network of participating computers. Once every minute or so a batch of transactions are released in a block to be validated by the network and added to the blockchain. (More on blockchain in a moment.)
Using Bitcoin technology, you could deliver pre-programmed currency for the specific purpose of healthcare expenses to a patient—and through the blockchain ledger system, this currency could only be used for this purpose. You could even program the currency in such a way that it expires after a certain period of time to prevent hoarding of resources.