Introduction
While some of you might be wondering how is it Bitcoin’s 10th birthday when Satoshi Nakamoto created the same in 2008, I would like to point to the significance of the year 2010 for Bitcoin.
It was in 2010 when Nakamoto gave the reins of Bitcoin to the open-source community. The first Bitcoin Client was launched and Nakamoto faded into oblivion from 2010 onwards. Bitcoin became a true decentralized peer-to-peer open-source system.
In this article, we revisit Satoshi Nakamoto’s original 12 Page White Paper and seek to examine its relevance in the contemporary world. In addition, we also try to speak to some leading opinion-makers and ask them what the next decade holds for the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin: An Ideal Promise for the Future of Financial Systems
If I won a dollar for every time I heard and read someone say Bitcoin is dead, I would be pretty rich by now. I read somewhere that the same has been announced at least 380 times by people who claim to understand how financial systems work!
However, here we are in 2020, living during the pandemic, and have just seen Bitcoin cross the $19000 USD threshold. Bitcoin was a promise for the newly emerging fintech world dominated at the time by debit cards, credit cards, and PayPal.
For Nakamoto, this governing of financial transactions always required an external authority. This authority would process the payment and get a commission in the process. The question that Bitcoin intended to raise was- why should it be so?
Imagine a scenario where someone has to send back remittance money to their families. This transaction to be processed would require the interplay of multiple providers, authorities, and regulations. All these bodies would charge their own fees, commissions, and percentages.
Why Bitcoin is still the most Revolutionary Fintech Project in the World?
According to Nakamoto’s vision, the external validation by an external body could be replaced by a more innovative and safer form of cryptographic approval. This would mean that the sender and the receiver are bonded in trust by the cryptographic network and do not require a third external party to validate the transaction and seek commissions for the process.
Unlike many people who state that Bitcoin is more like a coin, in reality in the words of Satoshi Nakamoto and the White Paper, it is more like a chain of digital signatures. Every time a specific Bitcoin passes into your hands, it carries with it the signatures of everyone who had previously owned the same.
This means that all transactions and signatures are recorded for each and every Bitcoin. The result of the same is that no one can ever engage in double spending a Bitcoin.
The details of the ‘coin’ had been enumerated by Nakamoto on pages two to nine.
The Next 10 Years of Bitcoin: Where will we be?
In the past ten years, we have already seen Bitcoin rising to meteoric highs and historic lows. It has captured the attention and imagination of everyone from Hollywood to hackers on the dark web. Governments too have not been left alone.
They are trying to figure out ways and means of benefitting from the same, protecting their citizens from its adverse impacts, and engaging in technologies like Blockchain for improving their economies. Sometimes, all these things are being done at the same time.
The next decade promises to be quite historic for Bitcoins. This is primarily because of the changes, which were expected in terms of tech and digital adoptions have become accelerated because of the Coronavirus pandemic. The next ten years will also see Zillennials joining the workforce and starting to earn.
Their penchant for all things digital and crypto has already been quite well-documented in different business studies and research papers.
The Final Word
Perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto did not imagine how his creation would be compared to the birth of the internet by many in 2020. If you too then the news spy, is one of the platforms you can benefit considerably from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of a paperless, borderless global financial system.
