The moon inched closer this morning as Bitcoin rocketed upwards from the doldrums of early teens into the roaring 20s. It is truly the a good time to be a Bitcoin bull, bull, bull. With such wanton enthusiasm and extraordinary glee in the air, tis the season perhaps, I felt inspired to go back to the basics. Because what is Bitcoin beside a revolutionary new way to store value on the internet?
Bitcoin is nothing without the technological backing of blockchain. Woah, now that was a wordy sentence.
Blockchain does three things super well. (LIST TIME… I LOVE LISTS)
- Blockchain tracks ownership of goods (aka data). Items on a blockchain are immutably and irreversibly owned (don’t make me bring up forks right now, put ur damn utensils away and keep reading). What does this mean? It means that any piece of information on the blockchain cannot be copied, stolen, or recreated without the entire system breaking down. For Bitcoin, this means that Bitcoins can only be owned, spent, and transferred by a single person (or entity) to another and then that person, and that person alone, can own, spend, or transfer said Bitcoin (ok they could also leverage that baby out for a mortgage, give it away in a stupid twitter thing to get followers, or pull any other wonderfully odd crypto shenanigan).
- Blockchain sounds cool. Hahahah, just kidding. Well, I mean, it does sound cool and makes you sound smart if you use it in a sentence. Any sentence. It doesn’t even need to make blockchain (see, I proved it by replacing “sense” with the word blockchain and you just went with it). The name is so cool it gets its own section on this list. I make the rules. Deal with it.
- Blockchain decreases slippages. Uh-oh, big words again. What the heck is slippage? Slippage is error. Slippage occurs when you have complex structures with multiple points of connection. At these points of connection two things usually happen: the complex structure gets bogged down and clogged OR the complex structure starts getting rid of information in order to run on time. Think of any inefficient system. Struggling to come up with one? Here are some examples: sending money overseas, voting for our President, tax documents, and ordering at Subway. A blockchain clears up these complex structures by creating a system of person-person (peer-peer, entity-entity) transactions.
- Sending money overseas is as simple as clicking a button and waiting 10 minutes (for the blockchain to do its blockchain thing), instead of the weeklong, bank-bank-custodian-bank-custodian-bank-bank-each-takes-their-own-percentage-cut thing that is generally accepted as overseas wire transfers.
- Voting for our President is as easy as confirming identity and hitting the “Screw it, Kanye West 2024” button, instead of watching middle aged white men touch their maps for three days straight.
- Tax documents can be automatically filed based on your digital holdings tracked… ON THE BLOCKCHAIN… so instead of manually printing out a piece of paper and doing your taxes and doing them wrong so then doing them again… it just does it automatically and you can go take a nap. You don’t even have to log on to turbotax. How exciting.
- I DON’T KNOW HOW SUBWAY ORDERING CAN BE FIXED BUT IF SOMEONE CAN COME UP WITH A BLOCKCHAIN IDEA THAT WOULD BE NICE BECAUSE I AM TIRED OF GOING UP TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE AND WONDERING IF I SHOULD TELL THEM WHICH BREAD I WANT OR WHAT KIND OF SANDWICH I WANT OR WHETHER I AM GLUTEN FREE OR NOT OR HOW LONG MY SANDWICH SHOULD BE.
-Kram
KRAM 