Building on Bitcoin: A Business Perspective

cryptonews.com:

In the last twenty-four months, the Bitcoin ecosystem has seen more development than the previous fifteen years. This development has bolstered Bitcoin’s most accepted current use-case, as an alternative store of value independent of the traditional financial system, by increasing its usability as a peer-to-peer payment network. Ultimately, the goal of Bitcoin, since its creation by Satoshi Nakamoto, is to become a global currency. While these technical advances have brought us closer to this goal, in order for Bitcoin to achieve this global status, there are still many technical developments required. This article aims at providing an overview of the current developer or builder ecosystem as well as exploring the current and potential markets that will arise from these new implementations.

Bitcoin’s first fifteen years

Satoshi created Bitcoin with a clear humanitarian vision: create a decentralized, trustless, financial system resilient to domination by any central authority. The Bitcoin white paper acknowledges the need for low transaction costs to compete with the legacy financial system. To achieve global adoption and fulfill its potential, Bitcoin must establish itself in three crucial roles: a stable store of value, a medium of exchange, and a global monetary network.

Market Basics

Perhaps the most critical technical feature to understanding the challenges facing Bitcoin as a payment platform is the number of transactions stored in a block in the Bitcoin blockchain. A block is a collection of transactions that are bundled together and recorded in the blockchain as a single unit. Any application must be cognisant of the block size. The block size is currently limited to 1 megabyte(MB) by the Bitcoin protocol,