Blocklunch 45 now Blockspark

Hi loyal followers! As of today, my newsletter will be hosted on https://blockspark.ghost.io/ so please feel free to sign-up directly on the site for the 11 month progressive course which started February 1st 2023.

I'll go through everything from Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, NFTs, DeFi, the Metaverse, Web 3.0 & much more besides mainly pertaining to the world of business use-cases.

Whatever industry you are in, blockchain will impact you sooner rather than later so it's good to get ahead of the game!

Here is the first newsletter of 2023 dropped on February 1st 2023.

Bitcoin, decentralisation & trust

The idea of the decentralisation of power has always been central to what blockchain is about & it remains one of the three pillars of this amazing technology (more later).

Bitcoin was the first successful use-case of blockchain technology & remains as relevant today as it was when it launched in 2009.

But before we look at this key moment, we have to go back a little further to the financial crisis of 2008. This period exposed the world to the flipside of hyper-globalisation that many hadn't thought too much about - the fact that with so many connections between countries & institutions, contagion, if something were to fail would spread like never before. The collapse of Lehman Brothers & the subsequent global crisis that followed would change the world forever.

The reaction of many central banks around the world including in the US & Europe was to print (create) huge amounts of money which they flooded into their respective economies & the period of 'cheap' money was born.

The creator (or creators - we don't know) of Bitcoin also known as 'Satoshi Nakamoto', understood three things:-

1. Hyper globalisation had exposed the whole world to the weaknesses / disasters of countries & large companies like never before.
2. An unlimited supply of traditional (fiat) money being pumped into global economies would devalue these currencies over time & cause inflation.
3. The world & many of its most powerful institutions had become too centralised exposing them to data hacks & financial loss.?

Bitcoin is not blockchain

On 03.01.2009 Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper which is an 8 page overview of why Bitcoin was created & the problems it set out to solve.

Satoshi had solved a longstanding issue which cryptographers had been striving to crack for decades that is called the 'double spend' problem. In short, this means that when we send a piece of commonly available information to someone via email for example, it doesn't matter if they send it on to another person or people or if you as the sender also send it to many others. The same cannot be said for sending value - if you owe someone 100 euros for a service, it's essential that once you've paid them, you no longer have that 100 euros. If you do, then the value goes to zero in this transaction.

Satoshi achieved this in a very simple way - by making the ledger of transactions open & transparent. Bitcoin is a public blockchain which means that it is accessible to everyone & all transactions conducted on it are visible to all forever & cannot be reversed. Each 'node' or computer which interacts with the Bitcoin blockchain has a copy of the complete ledger of transactions which is regularly updated. As each transaction has a unique verifier, it's almost impossible to conduct a double spend transaction. I say almost because theoretically, if one entity or group could control 51% or more of the computing power then this could happen (more later).

What makes Bitcoin even more interesting is that a maximum supply of 21 million is programmed into the core version of the code. New Bitcoins are created or 'mined' each day at a rate which is cut in half every 4 years (more to come - don't worry).

Next week, we'll continue by looking into the 3 core pillars of blockchain & why they're so important to all of the elements that come after. I look forward to continuing the journey with you then!

Jeremy Williams | Blockspark 2023.

Read the Bitcoin white paper here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Disclaimer

• Cryptocurrency is a key use-case & integral part of what makes blockchain so amazing & we’ll be discussing Bitcoin & other tokens during this course.
• This is by no means financial advice so please do your own research (DYOR) before investing if that’s your thing.
• Even though we’ll talk about decentralisation throughout the course, there are good reasons to stick with centralised structures in some cases.