If you are among the one's who believe Bitcoin is a 'bubble' or a 'digital tulip scam' but the technology behind it - 'Blockchain' is the real deal and is the future of where Technology is headed, this thread is for you
Lets understand what's Blockchain. If you are familiar with Torrenting movies & tv shows in your dorm room, then you are already exposed to the building blocks of Blockchains in a very primitive form.
What is Torrenting? A movie or any single file is split into million pieces and hosted on million computers, and when you raise a download request, these million pieces are put together in a particular sequence and made into a single file imitating its original form.
Remember there can only be one sequence to put together these million pieces, else the movie won't make sense & becomes a corrupted file, which is of no use
But why go through this instead of hosting as a single file on a single server? Hosting costs money & if server fails the file is doomed. Hosting on millions of computers virtually means there's zero downtime and costs next to nothing
If you can relate and understand this, you already understand decentralisation. Now imagine instead of just torrenting movies, you do everything this way. That's what Blockchain enables
Blockchain does this in a very elegant and secure way, remember the 'particular sequence' part in torrenting, that's called a Ledger.
A ledger is a sequence of live data which cannot be tampered with, because the ledger itself is decentralized and hosted on million devices.
So if a bad player decides to tamper the data, he has to know which of the millions devices has that particular piece of data and change all of them at the same time.
Let's assume he manages this humongous feat somehow, now the moment data is tampered the block won't get validated because it is compared with other millions of devices which are hosting the OG data. All the trouble of tampering for nothing
How the hell does it affect my day-to-day life? One obvious use case for this is Finance, a decentralized ledger takes away the systematic risk involved in Banking.
Bitcoin vs Fiat is a dead argument. Stable Coins like USDT which are pegged to USD is the real Fiat challenger (code decides to create or burn to manage stability). It is the biggest hedge against hyperinflation, countries like Venezuela can get a stable way to tender overnight
Eth, Sol, Ada - these all are like utility pipelines & power lines buried underneath and owned by millions of folks instead of say a BESCOM or BWSSB. Their utility being powering web3 - essentially like a UPI rail for others to build on top
Bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg. A proof of concept at best. The value it holds is due to its early mover advantage and being the poster boy of Blockchain for a decade. It may scrape through and go the Gold's way due to this
Smart Contracts are the real deal in Blockchain. It is like a regular contract where if a set of agreed upon conditions are met the contract gets executed. Ethereum pioneered Smart Contracts.
Now make this contract decentralized, you get a incredibly powerful system of validating literally anything. A housing loan, insurance, p2p lending... you get the drift.
If you have made this far, kudos to you! The various Coins & Tokens you hear today are solving one or the other problems. But it is still early days, more like 70's internet. Where just the utilities are just getting built
Like every technological advancement, there are dark sides to this as well. Shitcoins or Blockchain networks promising something and vanishing is one. Stay away. Knowledge is the only hedge to become wealthy.
Poor example, "imagine instead of just torrenting movies, you do everything this way" . do you think that blockchains will be used to store something as big as a movie?