Most blockchain advocates haven't even used Bitcoin
Bitcoin (BTC) popularised the term blockchain. Blockchains, or “decentralized and distributed digital ledgers used to record transactions across a network of computers,” have been around for over thirty years, the household name for a blockchain is Bitcoin.
That’s despite the fact that the Genesis block was mined well over 14 years ago when George W. Bush was president and “I Gotta Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas topped the charts–Bitcoin is still top of the blocks.
It’s to be expected, then, that most blockchain advocates would have used, understood or a the very least experimented with Bitcoin.
Nope. Not so.
Here’s an example. While MC’ing at the European Blockchain Conference in February, I asked the audience for a show of hands. I inquired of the circa 250 blockchain believers sitting in front of me:
Maybe 20 audience hands shot up. “Okay. Keep your hand up if you’ve used Bitcoin’s Lightning Network,” I said. The Lightning Network or (LN) is the payments network built on top of Bitcoin which allows near-instant, near-free transactions. Over half those hands went down.
One data sample is insufficient. So, the following day I quizzed the audience on stage. I was surprised to receive the same result. Four-fifths of the blockchain conference audience had never used Bitcoin.
Why is that? Why is it that so few people have touched arguably the only blockchain that solves what is known as the “scalability trilemma;” that of decentralization, security and scalability?
The Bitcoin blockchain, or timechain as Satoshi Nakamoto called it in the white paper, is still relatively small. Anyone with an old laptop can download the entirety of all transactions in order to run a node; the network can scale to reach millions and soon billions
Read more on cointelegraph.com
