Bitcoin is a great example of the blockchain in a real-world scenario. Being the technology that brought the blockchain into the practical realm, Bitcoin laid the foundation for all technologies that use blockchain. Companies that use IT in Ottawa and are curious about incorporating blockchain into their business processes, should look to Bitcoin as the quintessential case study for blockchain technology.
There are many features that Bitcoin possesses that drives the success of the cryptocurrency. Other applications utilizing the blockchain which tend to include many of these features, seem to be as promising as Bitcoin. Businesses that use managed services in Ottawa would be advised to pay attention to these other features when considering the blockchain, as they may be the key to augmenting the success of the technology within their environment. Below are just some of the features incorporated into the Bitcoin protocol, no doubt these features alone are not the sole reason behind Bitcoins rise to fame, so as always further reading is encouraged.
Incentive: Enterprise’s who use tech support in Ottawa, know that incentive drives the business world. After all, without the incentive of profit there would almost certainly be no businesses. Bitcoin has an ingenious mechanism for the incentive. When the first transaction in a block is calculated by a node, new bitcoins are generated (roughly 12.5 bitcoins are generated per block, as of the time of writing) and the creator of the block become owners of these new bitcoins. This is called bitcoin mining. The incentive layer also adds incentive, to be honest, rather than attack the network. If a hacker has the computational power to alter a block and the subsequent blocks afterward it would be more profitable for the hacker to engage in the honest act of bitcoin mining, instead of attempting a 51% attack.
Reclaimed disk space: In the article on the disadvantages of blockchain technology, disk space was mentioned as one of the downsides of the blockchain. Computer services users in Ottawa know even though the price per GB of storage is always at it’s lowest, hard drives are not cheap. Bitcoin has yet another genius feature which focuses on saving disk space. When a block reaches a certain age everything about it but its hash can be deleted from a client’s local copy of the blockchain. As that hash is a representative of all the previous transactions, the likelihood of a successful attack against the bitcoin network remains unaltered.
Choice: As described in the article “How Does The Blockchain Work?”, all nodes on the blockchain network validate each transaction. This would understandably make IT consulting clients in Ottawa a bit hesitant about the technology, as that could consume resources that should be dedicated to their business activities. With Bitcoin, admin of nodes have a choice in which transactions they calculate and validate, how much processor time they can dedicate, and so many other options to make being a part of the Bitcoin network work for the node rather than the network. This freedom of choice and the flexibility it offers is beneficial for individual nodes and their operators, the only trade-off seems to be the loss of potentially earned bitcoins.
These features along with the many others that make for success in the IT world, definitely aided in Bitcoin’s rise to fame and the notoriety that was given to the blockchain. A blockchain that does not incorporate these premises is bound to lose traction, as the operators of nodes on the network would grow weary of their client’s resources being consumed, without no return in-kind.