Letter #241: Bitcoin Is Blockchain's Killer App
Read now to learn how overlooking Bitcoin's impact on finance and more can lead you to miss the mark.
Dear Readers,
Technological advancements are typically judged by the level of impact they have on society at large. The internet, for example, is lauded as one of the most important developments of all time, and libraries worth of books have been written to account for all the benefits it has brought to the world. True, history is also littered with too many failed technologies to even count.
Blockchain, arguably another of history’s most important technologies, is similarly being judged by the people of the world today. Unfortunately though, the vast majority of them seem to be so unaware of why blockchain even matters.
Case in point: I came across an article earlier this week that posited that “keeping [artificial intelligence] in check” would be blockchain’s killer app, or, in other words, the use case that would finally prove blockchain's true value. Proponents of that idea have put forward the claim that the datasets upon which AI models are trained could be encoded on the blockchain to ensure data transparency and improve data longevity.
There are a number of flaws with that line of thinking. For example, AI models are trained on trillions of data points, which, without a doubt, would require massive amounts of storage in order to keep them available forever. Certainly only the largest of organizations could afford computers and drives large enough to house even a single AI dataset, all but ensuring that such a “blockchain” would be anything but decentralized.
Blockchain Already Has Its Killer App
The biggest flaw with the article’s thesis however, is that it ignores the fact that blockchain already has its killer app: Bitcoin. By doing so, the article completely misses the mark and sends any readers who are unfortunate enough to put stock in it down the wrong path.
To some extent, it's not surprising that some people would assume that Bitcoin, blockchain's very first use case, might not also be its most important. After all, it often takes new technologies time to find their market – we can return to our prior example of the internet, which seemingly didn't find its killer app until the advent of the World Wide Web several decades after the internet was first conceived.
Regardless, Bitcoin is without a doubt blockchain’s killer app. Bitcoin represents the first and only time that decentralized, self-sovereign money has come into existence. No currency that came before or after can compete with Bitcoin in terms of monetary superiority. It truly is a financial revolution that the majority of the Earth's population is hardly beginning to comprehend.
If that isn't blockchain’s killer app, then certainly nothing at all can ever be considered worthy to take on that mantle.
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This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.