Bitcoin vs Blockchain, a tale of two graphs
I remember the first time I heard the word “Bitcoin.” I was a power submitter on the old Digg.com, and these articles kept rising to the front page about this new digital currency. This was sometime back in 2008 or 2009.
I’ll admit that at the time, I had trouble wrapping my mind around it. It wasn’t real money. It’s money that someone made up online, it seemed. If someone had just made it up online, how could it have any real value? I mean, the value it had was that people had bought it with fiat currency. So wasn’t it just a virtual representation of fiat currency?
At the same time, it tugged on my brain. As the world becomes smaller and our daily lives become more global, it’s natural that we find new and easier ways to exchange goods and services, just as we found new and easier ways to communicate.
Then someone came up with Dogecoin, and that’s when I really felt like it was a joke. I mean, this virtual currency was named after a dog that had turned into a meme. What could it possibly mean for the future of anything?
Still, whenever I saw the word “bitcoin” in an article, I’d at least skim through it, curious how it had stuck around and was growing. If I’d bought even one Bitcoin back in 2009 … Well, we all know how that goes.
I got immersed in predictive analytics, natural language processing and machine learning for a couple years, relating to a startup I worked on. I hopped from project to project, learning new skills, technologies, and audiences, not really thinking about Bitcoin, Dogecoin or any other alt-coin that was cropping up.
A few years back, I started hearing the word “blockchain” come up. First, I heard it in relation to Bitcoin. As time went on, it seemed to have its own life, but what the heck was it?
Fast-forward to today and I’ve obviously gotten past all those questions. Well, some of them. I’m working at Rivetz, which is a hardware-based blockchain cybersecurity company, and talking every day with people who have bought our tokens with their hard-earned money, entrusting that we will provide the product we have promised.
It reminds me of the early days of the internet, when we were faced with this amazing tool that enabled communication across the globe and access to information that would have taken weeks, at a minimum, to dig up in meatspace.
We are only just starting to see how blockchain can change our lives. That it can immutably record history through redundant chains of information means that we can’t hide the history we want to forget.
Right now, it doesn’t look like Bitcoin’s going anywhere. One coin is worth more than $7,000, and that number has been rising daily. Is it a bubble? It could be. But blockchain and its myriad possibilities show us that whatever happens to Bitcoin and its legion of alt-coins, our world is about to undergo another transformation.
Google’s search trends bear this out.
Take a look at searches for blockchain since 2008:
And for bitcoin:
The numbers on the charts represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart in the selected time period (and region, which in this case was worldwide). A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular.
That means little, of course, until you compare the two terms:
It’s no surprise that Bitcoin is spurring much more interest in search than blockchain. But it also shows how much room there is for blockchain to grow in the public consciousness.
You need a “killer app” to make the public really stand up and take notice. For the internet, that was Netscape — a search engine that helped you actually find what was on this vast information superhighway. It probably won’t be Bitcoin, because it’s already so expensive and there’s a limited supply.
But Bitcoin is paving the way for the killer app that will be accessible and vital to anyone.
That’s when things will really start to happen.
