Blockchain has become really popular. Overhyped infact. This can be attributed to the recent spike in price of Bitcoin. There was an absolute frenzy. And back then, I thought that might be a bad thing because Bitcoin isn’t really worth $20,000 (IMHO), but now that I look back, it was a great move by the pumpers.
Due to their price maniuplation efforts, Bitcoin was the hot topic everywhere. On the news, on blogs, in social media. Even in real life! People wanted to know more about these cryptocurrencies and started searching for information on them. The scammers picked it up, made quite some money riding this wave of crypto traffic.
But there was a problem. The businesses caught on. They realized something that they thought was extraordinary. A P2P decentralized ‘blockchain’ is immutable! And that’s it, we had most software businesses on the bandwagon. Does blockchain deserve so much credit? FOR SURE! But my question is, does blockchain deserve this kind of hype in 2018 when it was launched publicly almost 7 years ago? No. I think it’s just another wave that we go through with technology adoption. It’s hype. And the worst part is that companies think blockchain is something really cool and complicated.
On a funny note, let me share with you that blockchain is in fact extremely trivial. It is a linked list with one special aspect. One of the data members of this node data-structure contains the hash of the previous node. Ta da! Now we have blockchain.
Sure, a lot of blockchain experts and thought-leaders would be really mad at me for this oversimplification. Indeed, there are so many more things in the crypto-ecosystem today that it has definitely become a complicated field. Just like any other, there is a price to pay. A barrier to entry. But they’re all really simple concepts and I encourage people to learn about it. Start off with cryptography, data strucutres, algorithms, linked-lists, trees, merkle trees etc.