This week’s Cryptonites episode dives into the evolution of blockchain–featuring some of the most prominent experts on the subject, including Don Tapscott, Ray Youssef, Andreas Antonopoulos, and Peter McCormack–talking about Bitcoin and the underlying technology that makes it the most decentralized, secure, and advanced form of money in history.
The edutainment channel kicks off the year with a three-part series, and this is the first episode you don’t want to miss, covering several hot topics–starting with the first attempts of creating online currencies secured by cryptography.
Diving into the network’s decentralization, security, and scalability–Tone Vays, Richard Ells, Nicholas Gregory, and Piers Ridyard touched on Bitcoin mining, Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, challenges of mass adoption, and secondary solutions that tackle the problem of Bitcoin scalability.
Continue reading for some of their impactful quotes.
PoW consensus mechanism
“I worked in banks–we would have loved to have had a system of 10 years, with essentially no downtime. That’s phenomenal. There’s no such thing and to have such high amounts of transactions going through Bitcoin every 10 minutes and to have never really gone down in 10 years is unheard of. I think it’s a sign of the hard work that many people have put through–whether that’s the miners, the core developers, the people running nodes, the people running exchanges–it’s quite a compliment to achieve that,” said CommerceBlock CEO Nicholas Gregory.
“When you hear the term mining, 99.9% of that is going to be called PoW. So the algorithm that gives you the decentralization, the part of the blockchain that’s super clever–that enables it to maintain itself–that is done by allowing people to form a consensus opinion. Now how do you know they are people? By doing something that’s mathematically really really complicated, and solving a mathematical problem, you are proving that you are a real person, or in this case a real machine,” explained Electroneum CEO Richard Ells.
Bitcoin scalability solutions
“So few transactions are gonna be done on-chain–because you can’t scale on-chain transactions. You got to scale them off-chain, and off-chain Bitcoin has a dozen good proposals to give you privacy and fungibility as a second layer solution–through wallets, through Lightning, through Liquid, and through lots of other innovations that are coming between Taproot and Bulletproofs, and the latest in Schnoor signatures,” pointed out blockchain researcher and analyst Tone Vays.
“The main thing about this is that individuals can independently take control of their finances and they can decide what software to run, which consensus rules to follow and then they become a participant in the security of the system–that’s empowering. That’s the most important thing to realize about this technology,” underscored Andreas Antonopoulos.
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