It’s almost exactly seven years ago that I started my master graduate internship at Rabobank. My colleagues just finished some experiments with Ripple for cross-border payments and got enthusiastic about the potential that blockchain could offer. Although Bitcoin was the first and oldest application, I was led to believe that it was blockchain which was the innovation, not Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was way too slow and energy intensive to be even considered any competition for the very efficient payment infrastructure we already had in the Netherlands in 2015. The seven transactions per second of the Bitcoin blockchain was often compared to VISA’s infrastructure throughput which averages around 2.000 tps and a peak capacity of 56.000 tps.
Bitcoin was often considered very obsolete in 2015, Ethereum just came out which promised much faster blocks and a lot more functionality in the smart contract layers. Furthermore, they promised to switch to Proof-of-Stake very soon, which is needed because the energy-inefficient Proof-of-Work consensus already consumed more than all of Ireland alone… or so I was told in many articles.
Both Bitcoin and Blockchain are technical concepts, which makes them different to understand. Bitcoin, however, is far more than just its blockchain. It was only three years ago that I learned that Bitcoin, among other things, is about economics, game theory and politics. I have been learning about Bitcoin since 2009 and I’m pretty sure I’m not even close to knowing everything.
The past months I’ve learned that, just like me, a lot of people have misconceptions about Bitcoin. In the following articles I hope to help people understand Bitcoin better or at least be open to the fact that Bitcoin is different from what you hear or read in the media.
