What is the Bittercoin: is it the true blockchain believers vs. the trough of disillusionment?- Part 1

Bitcoin community as of now

It has been noted that the past 12 months have seemed as annus horribilis in the cryptocurrency world as the Bitcoin community is still fighting its years-old- esoteric –to-an-outsider civil war that comes still nowhere nearby the consensus, as the Ethereum’s public image has not recovered from the DAO fiasco while the much-hyped R3 consortium has the abandoned blockchain technology as also the SEC rejecting the touted Bitcoin ETF. 

The question arising now is what now? As this is a slow death spiral it is also signaling the sad end of Satoshi Nakamoto’s dream and the motley crew of plucky crypto heroes defending it? Thereby is it something interesting happening beneath this sheen of despair and decay?

While the answer to the questions is that it is possible neither; probably the latter as also almost certainly not the former. Thereby the searching-for-the-new-new-thing, along with what-have-you-done-for-me- lately mindset of so much of the tech industry tends to equate a period of slow grinding with stagnation and death. While it is not so, there is this quixotic quest for the cryptocurrency killer app as the one that will bring widespread mainstream usage continuing and won’t succeed any time soon, as meanwhile a whole panoply of interesting and practical use cases has arisen. Let us call them maimer apps. These include the following:

Permissionless digital money

Here it comes as the raison d’etre of Bitcoin and of course let’s not lose sight of the fact remaining a remarkable accomplishment. This actual monetary value is then transferred between the two strangers as the transfer can be demonstrably indisputably verified without requiring the blessing of any other person or entity. While it can be counted as pretty amazing there are in many contexts international money transfers hedging for residents of high-inflation nations extremely useful. 

Whereas this doesn’t come as a killer app as though even if everyone in the world wanted to use Bitcoin, it is very big as the irrevocability of such transactions couldn’t because the network could only handle six transactions per second. As there also are proposals for off-chain solutions such as the Lightning Network supporting a vastly larger number of transactions that are only occasionally compiled and written to the master Bitcoin blockchain as it, however, seems to be a bit like a solution looking for a problem. There are still permissionless digital money as a big deal and enough all by itself to ensure that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies won’t be going away any time soon. 

Permissionless programmable money

Thereby referring to every Bitcoin transaction as a small program written in a custom scripting language, it is limited but still enough to do some powerful things where Ethereum the indisputable other most significant cryptocurrency removes this restriction allowing transactions to be dictated by any code.it is known as programmable money offering vast potential also a considerable bleeding-edge risk at last year’s DAO debacle showed.

Accordingly, the Ethereum is much more mature and battle-tested than it was last year as a lot of interesting things are being built atop it. Thereby Augur, a prediction market, WeTrust, a mechanism for people to pool money for large purchases as well as Numerai, discussed further below. Furthermore like Bitcoin, Ethereum, is permissionless as once there is someone, no one can dictate what you do with it. Therefore the only contract code can. Therefore the possibilities are still somewhat nebulous exciting in a vague vigorous handwaving kind of way.

Permissionless anonymous digital money

Bitcoin comes as pseudonymous but far from anonymous and every single transaction is recorded on an irrevocable public ledger for later scrutiny as it’s not nearly private enough for many people. 

Here enters Zcash hiding not just the sender and the recipient transactions but their amount maintaining a public blockchain to verify them via the mathematical magic of zero-knowledge SNARKS and Monero using well different mathematical magic. 

Finally Concluding On The Discussion

The Bitcoin community seems to be thriving and growing while some still argue that they enable drug dealing, tax evasion, etc., but on balance they seem to be a much needed mitigating factor in a world increasingly full of ubiquitous surveillance and increasingly built on surveillance capitalism. There are more facts to be considered. These are explained in the next post as they are to be explained in more detail. Stay tuned and read on the following posts. They give you more insight into the current scenario of digital money. More to follow and find.