Bitcoin Forum

Max Levchin, the co-founder of Paypal, has become the latest high-profile figure to speak out on Bitcoin. His words echo those of Michael Bloomberg from a few days ago; blockchain is the future, Bitcoin might not be.

Better than the Sum of its Parts

Blockchain technology has gone global in a very short space of time. From financial transactions to data storage and now, possibly, elections, its security and levels of anonymity are unparalleled in today’s technological context. Levchin told CNBC, “It’s a brilliant mathematical idea, fantastic technology, interesting commodity to speculate on. TBD on whether it’s a currency or just a way to make money fast.”


More: https://coinblip.com/blog/levchin-bloomberg-debate-experts-weigh-bitcoin/

There is no question that the blockchain technology behind the currency we know as Bitcoin will be a good force into the future and it would be a life-changing technology that can affect many areas of our lives. Name any industry and we can be sure that it can be revolutionize using the blockchain. And right now, there are so many applications based on this innovation. No wonder there are people who are not inclined to support Bitcoin have expressed their approval with the blockchain.

Bitcoin has become a polarizing agent...either you love it or you don't. Definitely, because it is a financial instrument there are always risks associated with it as market can go down and up depending mostly on how the players can be reacting to anything happening at the present and what can be in the future. Personally, I am all supporting Bitcoin and am definitely sure that Bitcoin has a good future and all the problems it is facing now will eventually be solved. Of course, nobody can be so sure of what can be in the future.

This is not the first time I have seen an article pointing out how someone thinks the blockchain technology is going to be the future. The truth is that it has already been around for quite long since even before Bitcoin was first created. Many corporations already used shared ledgers (albeit perhaps not publicly) to resolve any disputes between them, especially in the fields of operations and logistics where multi-steps processes have to go through several different companies before arriving at its final destination. A manufacturing operation, for example, would hold a ledger starting from the supplier of the raw materials required to produce the product and add to the ledger until they sent it over to the actual manufacturer to fill in their part of the ledger and do their part of the work manufacturing the product before passing it on to the distributor which would then pass it on to the retailer store, all of this being recorded into the ledger using blockchain technology. The only new part comes when relating it to being public and to transferring wealth.

No, that's not blockchain technology. Shared ledgers and blockchains are not the same thing.

You're right about one thing though, the concept of using databases where merkle trees verify successive data entries has existed for a long time before Bitcoin. This is one of the concepts that Satoshi combined to create Bitcoin.