BlockChain is today’s most discussed topic , majority of the industries are buzzing with innovations in blockchain , one key reason is that it is transforming the the way our economy, governance & businesses work and changing our conceptual understanding of trade ownership and trust, some history would be nice to understand more precisely.
It all started with Bitcoin in October 2008 when it appeared on an online mailing list by a pseudonymous author named Satoshi Nakamoto whose origin is unknown , and in the next year January 2009 there was software release of bitcoin, since then it went viral, gained lot of traction from tech communities around the world, especially in fintech space it has completely transformed the way financial transactions work.
Bitcoin is a Currency (Digital money) encrypted with most secure cryptographic code helps to make transactions between P2P(person to person) instantaneously with out any trusted entity or middlemen(banks), Sender can transfer portions or full bitcoin from his bitcoin digital wallet to receiver’s bitcoin digital wallet address, all it takes is just a click and the transaction is done, the transaction charges are nothing when compared to fiat currencies (based on the amount you send), fiat currencies are sovereign currencies issued by the governments(ExDollar,Pound,Euro,Rupee etc) in cross border transactions it cuts heavy transaction charges because of the fact that it is eliminating the middleman(Banks) and their conventional systems like NEFT, RTGS & SWIFT etc, (Bitcoin charges between 0.0001 to 0.0005 BTC for transactions, which is far less than traditional wire transfer services can offer, especially since most of them have standard fees as well that are not percentage based) and with the upcoming Layer-2 Protocol “Lightening network” the transaction time with bitcoin is almost instantaneous when comparing with banks which might take anywhere between 3 to 7 days - This has attracted investors that are interested in improving the money transfer system currently employed , Investors are not the only ones Bitcoin has attracted ,cross border giants like Western Union and MoneyGram International have started contemplating whether they should offer solutions in the future that contain possibilities related to Bitcoin and Digital Money.
Bitcoin is derived from the idea of macro economic school of taught and is based on Blockchain technology .
Blockchain is open source technology otherwise known as distributed ledger which keeps & maintains list of generated records stored in blocks ,each block contains the history of every block, it is being constantly verified ,updated and shared between thousands of computers across the globe ,these computers are called nodes, because of the fact that there are so many computers updating and verifying transactions throughout the world ,it is technically unfeasible to hack the entire blockchain.
The Blockchain technology can be applied in many scenarios where trust plays a major role and because of its transparency and use cases in the recent times many industries started adopting blockchain to streamline the process and reduce inefficiencies in their workflow.
A recent World Economic Forum survey estimates that a significant portion of the world’s GDP will eventually be stored on blockchain. They predict 10% by the year 2025 which equates to around 10 Trillion dollars.
