Bitcoin

Why Companies Are Pushing Bitcoin

Many companies are pushing BTC and helping to drive the newly sparked Bitcoin revolution.

The majority of these businesses are … surprise, surprise, payment services like Skrill, Paypal, and Square. They tie into other businesses that offer perks for users to utilize cryptocurrency for their deposits and withdrawals.  This practice is quite common among the best sportsbooks – check this Nitrogen Sports review.

A lot of momentum has been built because of enterprises adopting blockchain technology. Blockchain and cryptocurrency are not mutually exclusive, but most cryptocurrencies do operate with some form of blockchain. Let’s start with what blockchain is, as it is sometimes misunderstood. 

What is Blockchain

Blockchain was first developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, the same pseudonym as the developer/developers of Bitcoin. It was originally designed for digital currencies, though it quickly became useful in other areas as well. 

So what is it? It’s a digital ledger. A supposedly incorruptible one. One of the easiest ways to dumb-down this complex system is to imagine a spreadsheet showing records of transactions or interactions and that sheet is duplicated thousands of times. On top of this, it is automatically updated and continually reconciled. In effect, this creates an easily verifiable public record that isn’t stored in any one specific user’s system, but tens of thousands, even millions of computers simultaneously. This makes tampering without leaving the evidence of tampering impossible. Unlike a paper ledger or an excel file that you could simply go in and delete information or fudge the numbers with an eraser or the backspace button, with blockchain, that edit would be documented and updated across all copies. So, if things don’t add up, one can easily go back through the ledger and find where things went awry and which user it was. But even though there would be a record, you can’t just alter information in the blockchain, here’s why.

Each group of transactions – in the case of Bitcoin– is lumped together in a ‘block,’ hence the name blockchain. Each block is made up of ‘notes’ that have been updated and encrypted and to alter the information, your computer, or system would have to override everywhere that the blockchain is housed. Remember, it’s self-reconciling and in the case of a BTC blockchain, stored on millions of computers. So, though it is theoretically possible, you would have to overpower millions of computers at the exact same time and update millions of instances of the virtual ledger simultaneously before the block checks-up on itself again. So, needless to say, it’s pretty darn secure. No one has been able to falsify a blockchain ledger so far. It’s tamper-proof and 100% transparent which keeps the users accountable for their actions. 

This transparency and transactional security is why many companies have adopted the use of blockchain. Even those who didn’t get into cryptocurrencies right away have realized through their use of blockchain as a way to securely track information, that you can in fact, securely process and track digital currencies. OK. So now we get to the nuts and bolts of it. Blockchain is automated, so there is no transaction fee. That means you can bypass the expensive transaction fees charged by banks and financial institutions. 

For the person or business selling a product or service, this is advantageous. It is the reason that so many companies are starting to push Bitcoin and other cryptos. It’s also the reason that there is so much push-back from the government and other parties. They are afraid because it cuts out the middle-man.

Blockchain and BTC in Action

Imagine selling a book and having your book encoded into the blockchain and paid through a cryptocurrency. Suddenly, there is a secure transaction where you know you are going to get paid for the book you wrote and the user will only get the book through the blockchain when they pay. This eliminates the need for the credit card processing company who is taking a significant cut and companies like Amazon who are ‘needed’ to deliver the product to the consumer. Now instead of the author getting a meager portion of the book sale, they get the whole amount. Thus, could sell the book for much less which is good for the consumer as well.

This is a great example of why certain companies are pushing BTC and blockchain … and an even better reason why it’s feared.

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