19 Words Prove Just How Audacious Bitcoin Really Was

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the email that announced the birth of bitcoin, I have been reflecting on the prevalence of cargo-cults in the blockchain industry, what caused them and what we should do about it.

Many of the first business blockchain platforms broadcast all data to all participants, or coarsely-defined subgroups of participants.

Full broadcast was how bitcoin did it so it sometimes felt like those platforms 'cargo-culted' the same concept, even though it made perfect sense for Bitcoin but absolutely no sense at all for business.

Many business blockchain platforms run on something called the Ethereum Virtual Machine and require developers to program in a language called Solidity.

If these EVM-based business blockchains take root, one could imagine the world's business ecosystem could be running the EVM long after the platform for which it was invented had moved on!

Satoshi Nakamoto didn't wake up one morning thinking: "What the world really needs is for transactions to be batched up and confirmed slowly in blocks!" No, bitcoin is a batch system because physical reality - the speed of light - means it's impossible to design it any other way if you also want to achieve the system's design goals around pseudonymous cryptoeconomically-intentivised consensus.

I've long argued that the world of enterprise blockchains will consolidate far faster than anybody expects, that a "Day of reckoning" is coming.

It's only a small exaggeration to say that the entire architecture of bitcoin unfolds inevitably and relentlessly from those 19 words.

In sum, bitcoin is an amazingly elegant solution to a very well specified business problem.

To see what I mean, let's look at Corda, the open-source blockchain platform my team supports and maintains, with the help of a large and growing open-source community.