JDCAG (NOT Colin) said:
I should be studying 11 said:
But that only works if every bank uses the same blockchain. And they would need to develop it and maintain it. And if it's not open for everyone to view and validate, then it doesn't solve any problem.
The whole point of Bitcoin's blockchain is that it's a trustless public record of exchange. You don't have to know who the public key belongs to, but you can validate that every transaction in it's history took place. There are no secrets or questions when it comes to where each Bitcoin sits within the network, from the time first block was mined, to now.
Again, let me caveat this by saying that I really want to learn more about this stuff, so I'm happy to admit my navete and learn from it. I have no real dog in this fight, having played some with BTC, but not being firmly pro or against. It is still fascinating to discuss.
I definitely think there is a ton of value in the underlying technology here (blockchain, open ledger, etc.), but I guess my long term concern is that nothing in that statement specifically indicates BTC as the vehicle, right? If an alternative was developed and had the backing of banks (and their underlying products like credit cards, traditional accounts, loan products, etc.), you will have a definite segment of the population that refuses to buy in - probably a large majority of the current folks who champion BTC....but you would have a HUGE amount of the population that happily jumped on board....and if something like that were to happen, and the commercial sector followed the same big banks they're used to dealing with, would that hurt the ability of BTC itself to grow beyond some theoretical value store?
I guess what I'm saying is how do folks that are hopping on different coins know which ones are VHS and which ones are BetaMax....and if you're in a situation where the government has a vested interest in promoting their horse in the race, does that change your calculus at all?
You are 100% right that there "could" be something else that comes along and offers the same base functionality of Bitcoin but goes by another name. There are other projects now that have a different layer 1 blockchain and completely separate ecosystem in place (Ethereum being the 2nd largest).
We are still extremely early in the use-case department when it comes to cryptocurrency and their practical application. Bitcoin by itself doesn't do too much right now other than exist as a means of payment and money transfer. It's the best at what it does and is the most secure for a number of reasons; mostly being that there is no centralization at all. It was created and the code distributed and people have joined organically by mining and running nodes since inception. There is no company, group, or board that controls Bitcoin. All development is done by volunteers who propose changes and network participants running validator nodes get to vote on any changes. Since Bitcoin is Proof of Work, meaning it requires real money in the form of ASICs and power to mine new Bitcoin, it is theoretically impossible for any one person, country, or group to ever take control of the network. If you try to get 51% of the hash power of the network (meaning you control it) you would be constantly chasing a moving target since the network responds to the increased hash rate with increased difficulty in solving the next block.
Others are moving to, or already have, a Proof of Stake validation methodology. This means that in order to run your own validator node, or participate in the network, you have to "stake" your own coin, sort of like collateral. The thesis is that since you have to put your own money into the network to harden the network, a 51% attack is extremely unlikely because you would be throwing your own money away. Both methods have their pros and cons, but I tend to align more with Proof of Work as more secure.
The future use cases for Bitcoin, or any crypto, will rely on layer 2/3/4 technologies that operate on top of it. That's where things like Smart Contracts, NFTs, dApps come into play and have real-world utility. All of those utilities built on top of Bitcoin will eventually require the use of Bitcoins (really Satoshis, or Sats, which are the smaller pieces of a Bitcoin. Kind of like cents to the dollar) to operate.
There are so many things that will be built on top of the blockchain over the next 5 to 10 years but because of the different layer 2/3/4 protocols, you'll never really need to know how they work. They'll just work and be more secure because of the underlying technology. I think that underlying technology will end up being Bitcoin, but, it could be something else. Time will tell.
