Bitcoins vs Love messages carved on trees
For generations young man where carving hearts on trees to impress theirs ladies.
We’ve all seen them. Maybe you did it or someone did it for you. Some of them are simple just a heart, initials and an arrow, some are sophisticated and just by looking at them we know that whoever done them spend considerable amount of time.
The purpose seems to be clear. Tell her that you love her and assure her that your feeling will stay for years to come no matter what. Will persist the same way as the symbols you’ve just carved on that tree.
But these days when more and more people move in to the cities, this habit of proving your love using knife and tree seems to be less common. Nowadays young man will prove his love rather by updating his social media relation status than cutting anything on the tree.
Just recently there is even more cool/nerdy way of ensuring your second half that your feeling will stay for ever. Bitcoin users are engraving love messages into the bitcoin’s blockchain ledger. An example in different languages can be seen in the various blockchain explores.
Here in Romanian someone loves Anne.
https://chain.so/tx/BTC/f94c5a3c4f2a2dea57ce8c91d96b6fa0bfff47b4dd94efc40890d64b659b5801
And here in French someone loves T.
https://chain.so/tx/BTC/7deea47279ea54537a70a43d288fbeb184d4aee77cb475daee8d516d37c096f1
Who would think. Why people are doing this ? Isn’t bitcoin just a temporary thing which will disappear in a year or two?
No. I think bitcoin will stay with us for good contrary to everything you might hear in the media. If this will be the case all messages stored in the bitcoin’s blockchain will also stay. OK but what is so special about it? All my posts on social media will probably stay there as well.
Well there are two properties of the blockchain which makes storing love messages there very attractive. The blockchain is distributed and immutable.
First the fact that it is distributed and there is currently more than 7000 copies of it (see the graph below) all over the word makes it very unlikely that one day it will just disappear. It is different than any of the social media providers that one day on short notice might just pull the plug and all your posts are gone.
Second property immutability is even more interesting. The way the blockchain works is that all transactions once put in can not be altered later. Here some sophisticated math is required to explain all these in details, but lets skip it for now. In plain words it means that no one in the bitcoin network has enough power to alter the transactions in the blockchain. Even better when new blocks of transactions are added, it become more and more difficult for anyone to even think about changing anything in the previous blocks.
There you go — your love message once in can not be changed. Isn’t it an excellent way of saying I Love You.
But what if you are wrong and bitcoin will disappear in few years ?
Even if this happen and bitcoin will be forgotten the blockchain will not. It is so huge invention that the copy of it will probably stayed archived in places like The Library of Congress which believe me or not is already archiving tweets. The copy of the blockchain will stay in the archives and with it all transactions and messages. After many millennia archaeologists and researches will study it. At that time there might be no trees but your love message will still be there.
Would you like to store a message ? Here my previous post which explains how to do it using inthebitcoin.com service.