W
hat started with a group of “cypher punks” and the mysterious pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 has now led to Facebook changing its name to Meta in 2021 and according to some, is about to transform the world we live in ways we can’t even imagine.
Are you ready?
Do you really understand what bitcoin is?
The most popular network protocol in the world, TCP/IP protocol suite, was invented in the 1970s by two DARPA scientists, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, persons most often called the fathers of the internet. Little did they know the magnitude of impact and disruption to the world their invention would cause. The free flow of information enabled innovation at a rate we had never seen in our history. For better or worse, we live in a different world than the world before the internet.
Naysayers were in full force during the invention of the automobile, electricity, the internet, and now bitcoin. Transformational inventions like these don’t care what people think. Don’t be fooled by the naysayers who know as much about bitcoin as they do about how the internet works. A tsunami is coming, and it is a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are independent thinkers, innovators, and visionaries.
The next wave of this global transformation is based on a new protocol that enables the free flow of value. The resulting innovation is happening faster than ever. Industries thought to be impenetrable are about to be disrupted and opportunities for global economic growth will raise the standard of living for everyone, especially for underdeveloped countries.
Bitcoin is a poor name for a protocol that enables the free flow of value. Satoshi Nakamoto named it bitcoin when he/she wrote the white paper in 2008, but it speaks nothing to what it really is. Cryptography, digital signatures, and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies were combined to solve a longtime computer science problem called “the double spend” problem. Until bitcoin, there was no way to transfer data in the digital world like we transfer objects in the physical world. In the physical world, objects leave our possession when transferred to another person. In the digital world, copies of data remain on our computers and a thousand servers in between, such as when sending an email. This is why digital value can not be transferred without a trusted intermediary to insure fair play. For example, banks are the trusted intermediary for transferring money. Bitcoin fundamentally changes hierarchical systems of trust. Throughout history, centralized hierarchical systems of trust is all we’ve ever known. This creates a challenge for many to understand bitcoin since we have nothing in our known universe with which to associate it. These ancient systems of trust are bottlenecks to innovation and fertile ground for corruption.
An Insider’s Perspective on
Bitcoin
How Will It Affect Your Future? By Brian Sewell
62 Southern Utah Business Magazine :: Spring 2022
