Bitcoin … “A Model T for Payments”

We must praise Bitcoin for surviving a decade, and showing that there was a new world possible. But, for many in the research community who want to build more trusted systems, its legacy and its association with bad things is something that doesn’t help with outlining how a new digital world can be build. It has long been seen as a role-model for Blockchain/DLT (Distributed Ledger Transactions) work, and but has now become an online investment method, in the same way that stocks and shares are traded.

Now the CTO of Ripple defined that Bitcoin is … “A Model T for payments”. The waste of energy of Bitcoin is a disgrace that no-one can avoid. It’s proof-of-work scheme might have seen acceptable a decade ago, but now its competition method used to secure the network just cannot be justified.

It is public, too! You might think that Bitcoin trading is secret, but it’s not! Everyone can see exactly who you trade with, and what the value is. If we are to build more trusted systems, we need to look at anonymising the blockchain layer, and build systems on top of this which start to build our existing digital infrastructures in a more trusted way.

It’s scaling too has proven to be difficult, and where it struggles to get anywhere near our existing payment methods.