5 posts tagged with "Blockchain"

Less than a year ago, I was genuinely optimistic about blockchain. The technology had real properties, real use cases, and I wanted to understand it properly before forming opinions. Then $40 billion evaporated in a week, and the picture changed.

When I first dug into blockchain, I focused on the technology. Distributed ledgers, consensus, immutability. What I didn't spend enough time on was the most obvious problem with Bitcoin as actual currency. It moves too much. Accept $100 in Bitcoin today, and it might be worth $85 by Friday. I built a payments company. That kind of volatility makes a currency useless for commerce. So people built something to fix it.

I've spent the last two posts explaining what blockchain is and how it works technically. The natural question is: what can you actually do with it?

In my last post, I covered what a blockchain is conceptually: a distributed ledger that enables trust without a central authority. Now I want to dig into how it actually works. Understanding the mechanics helps explain why the system is hard to cheat.

I've been digging into blockchain lately, trying to get past the hype and understand what the technology actually does. The term gets thrown around a lot, usually in the same breath as cryptocurrency, but the underlying system is worth understanding on its own.