Bitcoin vs. the Blockchain Why It Matters

Admin   |   01 May, 2015   |   1372   |   3980

In this 5,000-word analysis on the differences between Bitcoin and the Blockchain, Daniel M. Harrison argues that identifying the two apart from one another has to be the first priority.

Bitcoin the technology exists somewhere in between a series of contrasting worlds.

On one side you have the idealists, people whose views are so left-leaning that they would put those of many ACLU members to shame. These people believe in the permeability of the virtual currency’s potential, the possibility that it has to transform vast swathes of industry and society to a something of a more equitable distribution, of the possibility that it might serve the poorest reaches of the world one day, to “bank the unbanked” as they frequently put it.

On the other side of the coin, if you’ll excuse the pun, you have the sort of capitalist whose more libertarian than Charles Koch (assuming such a thing is possible). These veritable right-wingers believe resolutely that the State serves no purpose other than to be disbanded entirely by the populace who it should serve in no other capacity than that of slave labor, that it ought to be every man for himself out there in a constantly adaptive (to ensure only the fittest make it, naturally) strategic warfare for wealth creation where possession is not some fraction of the law but the only item apart from free speech and the right to bear arms that’s written into the constitution protecting their unalienable rights of ownership.

Equally, among those working with the Bitcoin technology are those whose moral values could withstand a full NSA screening and come up clean (and probably have on a number of occasions, too); equally, on the other side of the fence, there are hoards of get-rich-quick profiteers with histories more suspect than Al Capone’s. By conducting the most rudimentary Google search, it’s possible to find swathes of both kinds of individual associated with Bitcoin’s short history in one way or another.

Much of the reason for this extreme contrast ultimately comes down to a duality that is manifest in the nature of the way that the technology underlying Bitcoin is inherently parceled together: on the one side of this duality is the Blockchain, the veritable protocol on top of which and a part of which Bitcoin exists written into code as a unit of transferrable value, and on the other side is a unit of bitcoin itself, the quasi-nouveau-financial instrument with a convenient ascribable value measurement that just about anyone today who has an internet connection can buy and sell.

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