Coinster Thoughts: Organizing Blockchains
Our weekly editorial brought to you by a Coinme team member.
This week: Dom Garrett, Director of Engagement
When I say Google, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
If you are like most people, you probably think of this:
Well, the tech giant that powers the largest video site on the planet (YouTube) and the largest email provider (Gmail) has been quietly working on a project called BigQuery which is aiming to do the same thing to blockchains as it did to the internet: organize and make it easier to navigate.
In a recent article in Forbes, Allen Day, Google’s senior developer advocate for Google Cloud, discussed the project. By searching millions of transactions and wallets from the bitcoin, XRP, and ethereum blockchains he and his team can get a better look at how funds are moving and what the valid use cases for the technology may be.
While to the average purchaser of digital currency this may seem neat but ultimately useless, this technology promotes and an entirely new level of transparency in digital currency. Until now, you would need to search transactions wallet by wallet, but with BigQuery new insights will help confirm (or deny) the use cases laid out by the dev teams of the various blockchains.
What does this mean for the casual bitcoin holder?
Let’s take Bitcoin Cash for example. Some of you may know that there was an internal debate in the bitcoin community in 2017 that lead to a “hard fork” or splitting of the bitcoin blockchain into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Now BCH was set up to be a currency that was faster and easier to use for smaller, micro-transactions (much like the dollar).
This, in theory, sounds wonderful. However, using the tools Google and Day’s team created, they found that instead of increasing the number of micro-transactions, large sums of BCH were in truth being “hoarded” by a few wallets. Not very transactional.
This is the main benefit for everyday people beginning their digital currency journey: Until now, you had some level of project transparency, but the “legitimate” use cases for bitcoin and other currencies were hard to prove. Tools like this will assist in cutting through the noise and help users locate the projects and blockchains that are doing what they say they should.
If Google has the same success in organizing and searching blockchains as they did with the internet, there will not be anywhere for failing projects to hide.
That is good news for all of us.
