There is a 50 percent chance that you would have heard about the word blockchain, crypto coin, or cryptocurrency trading. One can be sure there is an even greater chance that you've heard of Bitcoin, EOS, or Ethereum. Blockchain and Bitcoin have become synonymous as well as interchangeable. Much like the terms LTE and 4G.
The thing is that Bitcoin is known as a cryptocurrency, and it makes use of blockchain technology.
However, limiting blockchain to any particular cryptocurrency or Bitcoin is a mistake.
To fully understand blockchain is a bit more complicated than you would think as there is not a definite way to define this emerging new technology.
What we do know about blockchain is that most refer to it as a digital ledger where transactions as made and kept account of publicly. But there is more to it than mere record keeping.
Exchange experts make it their business to find out how blockchain impact our lives.
Thanks to Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain became reasonably interchangeable.
All sorts of new digital currencies made their debut that seem to steer away from traditional cryptocurrency models.
Have you heard of Ripple?
Once this particular cryptocurrency came it, mining formed no part of their standard criteria. Not long after, Ethereum came out. From here it just kept expanding.
Nowadays, you may want to think of crypto of being in the cloud where other people's computers would be used to host things.
While this concept is not anything new, it did represent sort of an enterprise movement where most folks began to rethink their business use cases and innovated the way they do things.
Something similar is currently happening with blockchain in that there is a strong cohesive movement where people are keen to try new things. One should consider it to be valuable as every so often, you come across industries where nothing much would change in two decades. Until something like this comes along, that inspires many to start innovating how they do things.
From what we discussed over here, it is clear that blockchain is still in its infancy phase. However, one wonders whether it is not just a secure, shared database.
What Makes Blockchain so Different?At first, the experts thought that there was no need for blockchain. This idea was driven by the fact that they were deploying various payment solutions for banks and in the process of moving away from a shared ledger as it added a lot of overheads.
Besides, governance tends to be extremely complex and involves different scalability and privacy issues.
What people really valued about cryptocurrencies such as Ripple was its transparency and consistency.
What happened is that they applied a consensus algorithm on a transactional level rather than a ledger level. Therefore, we no longer think blockchain will replace databases.
Ripple does not think of itself as a blockchain, but rather as a payments company.
During 2017, banks reached out to them to ask if they could use RXP, which is their brand for sky money. Doing so would eliminate the requirement to foster correspondent relationships.
Be wary of having your monies deposited in a bank that is part of another country in case they go under, in which case you would have massive problems to deal with.
We are well aware that global commerce is on the increase. Therefore, there is a higher demand for cross-border transactions, which also creates tension. Banks desire fewer relationships as they are time-consuming. However, customers want easier cross-border transactions for which XRP provides the way out.
Markets in India and the Philippines that are potentially challenging to reach would benefit from such systems.
What makes Bitcoin so valuable?
Very much the same reason why gold is considered valuable. Not because gold is seen as something that is shiny, conductive, and malleable, but due to the standards it represents.
A few features worthy of mentioning that makes gold extremely valuable is that it's hard to counterfeit; easy to merge, refine, transport, and subdivide; and also, very scarce.
Bitcoin does a bit more than gold such as travel across the world, from one individual to another, with no middle persons, within minutes.
What would be of great interest to many is the ability to make use of a trusted cryptocurrency exchange to handle various digital currency transactions with no hiccups.