The Problem with Bitcoin (and the undeniable example of history)
By: Crowd Machine
Tags: Apple, Crowd Machine, Ethereum, Microsoft, Bitcoin

Craig Sproule, Crowd Machine CEO & Founder

San Jose, United States, 18 January 2018 — What seems like a long time ago now, I began writing code. It was back when languages such as assembly or C were the go to options. Pushing and popping from registers were the norm and writing super-efficient code was mandatory due to limited memory availability.

For many of you, this may sound very foreign. That’s perfectly understandable as these types of tasks have been abstracted away over time and replaced with languages that have eased the practice of writing a program. Developers using Python, for example, don’t have to concern themselves with memory management or worry about buffer overflows.

The good old days?

While I look back on those days through rose tinted glasses, I have to admit that they probably weren’t the good old days. I recall spending two days tracing a bug which turned out to be a missing semicolon on the end of a line of code. Fortunately, preprocessors and compilers are a little more user friendly than they once were. Having said that, it still falls a long way short of where we need to be as an industry.

Which brings me to Bitcoin. A fantastic implementation of Blockchain with so much promise that it’s hard to fathom the extent to which it may impact our lives. It has breathed life into what may potentially be the instigator of a new internet. So much promise but so difficult to use. It’s a situation that reminds me of another example from history.

Apple vs Microsoft

Many years ago, there was a little company called Apple. They made a fantastic personal computer that everyone loved. It was so easy to use and, at the time, it appeared that Apple had the world at its feet. Trailing along behind Apple was Microsoft’s MS-DOS and then later their first incarnation of Windows. It was terrible, which I know because I used to write code for them.

The question is, why wasn’t I writing code for the Apple? The answer is simple — the Apple was closed to developers at large. You couldn’t write apps for the Apple because Apple didn’t let you. Nowadays, it can certainly be argued that Apple is dominant with consumers. However, Microsoft owns the enterprise market and they make a lot of money doing it.

The reason why Microsoft is so dominant in that sector is because thousands of developers started writing apps for DOS and Windows simply because they could. Where you couldn’t get an app for an Apple, you could certainly get one for a PC.

And that’s the key point — apps drive technology adoption. Plain and simple.

Bitcoin vs Ethereum

So, you may be asking yourself, what has this got to do with Bitcoin?

Although Bitcoin is not closed to developers, it reminds me of Apple while Ethereum reminds me of Microsoft. I’m sure that Bitcoin bigots would argue that Bitcoin is more robust, and its focus is different. However my response would be ‘we’ve heard it all before’. We’ve been on that wheel several times in the past where people get religious about technology. Apple vs PC, Windows vs Linux…the list goes on.

The single biggest difference I see right now is that developers are flocking to Ethereum because it’s easier. You can write a smart contract for it in an abstracted language, whereas writing a smart contract for Bitcoin is painful and limited. There are 3rd party initiatives in place that address this issue but natively it’s more difficult than it needs to be — it’s easier to make simple mistakes and, because of the nature of what it provides, it can result in dire consequences.

Don’t forget the devs!

As far as I’m concerned, both Bitcoin and Ethereum still have a long way to go. Right now though, Bitcoin is being Apple and Ethereum is being Microsoft. If you create a paradigm that allows developers to participate easily, they will gravitate towards it and build apps. As I pointed out earlier, apps drive adoption and a blockchain is useless without an app sitting on top of it.

You might be surprised to hear that, personally, I prefer Bitcoin. Maybe that’s because I’m a little old school and like purity. If history provides any example to go by though, that’s not how the world works. Unless Bitcoin becomes much easier to write apps for, Ethereum will continue to gain traction because of the number of apps that are available that use it.

I’m not suggesting that Bitcoin will go away but it may not be the blockchain that dominates in the app stack. It may just end up being the go to ledger for financial transactions, which would be totally ok. The challenge is that it may become subservient to other blockchain entrants too.

However, what impact this has on its long term economic position is probably best left to the scholars.