They want you to believe that blockchain is just a ledger, but it's a power shift

I was looking over some financial data of a particular payment system and a wave of thought to make comparisons to Bitcoin hit me and in the process, I realized a key flaw in my little mid-week project, a certain alignment flaw.

Comparing Bitcoin to this payment system was like comparing a calculator to a PC, one serves a single purpose, the other is multifaceted, serving a range of purposes including that of the calculator.

The bigger problem here is that my urge to make the comparison in the first place is influenced by how most people have pre-defined these systems. The accustomed ideology has put both solutions in the same product market even though one has a wider market advantage.

We live in a fragmented world, sometimes, it's a good thing, other times, not so much, but the biggest problem with this reality is that it's enabled an unhealthy concentration of power that despite the fact of having a largely diverse and disconnected system, globally, we are still very much affected and essentially governed by a small body.

Blockchain fixes this by unifying our fragmented systems and enabling consensus-based governance. Certainly, some could assume that the existence of “multiple blockchains” still makes the system fragmented and the dominance of specific ecosystems still makes about the flaws of our traditional reality.

This would not be an entirely accurate assessment.

First off, multiple blockchains means nothing if we build interoperability. Certainly, governance remains non-aligned but that's fine because it promotes actual decentralization.

If we were to all focus on one blockchain, we couldn't avoid centralization. We need numerous independent blockchains with decentralized economies that are interoperable with each other.

Now, when it comes to dominance and its effects on smaller blockchains, this is a fault of ours. Just as we've allowed our ecosystem to be influenced by the movement in traditional markets, we've allowed asset markets like Bitcoin to influence our ecosystem.

It is up to us to disincentivize pairing with Bitcoin as that is a major reason the movement of Bitcoin market price influences other assets. Now that I've thought of it, it seems like a deliberate design by exchanges to influence the direction of every crypto asset. Because, imagine if Bitcoin could dump significantly and other assets remained up, that would be an incentive for investors to jump ship into alts and maybe they can't just have such liquidity flow occur.

Just a thought anyways because it's odd that the Bitcoin chart is often mirrored by stable alts.

Blockchain is Bigger than Visa

Visa was the payment system mentioned above and the purpose of my research comparison was to uncover if blockchain was truly a cheaper way to move money around.

Visa Inc. reported net revenues of $35.926 billion for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, marking a 10.02% increase from the previous year.

In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, Visa processed approximately 234 billion transactions, averaging about 639 million transactions daily.

In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, Visa's total payments and cash volume reached $16 trillion, encompassing both purchase transactions and cash access transactions.

This figure represents the aggregate dollar amount of transactions processed through Visa's network during that period.

Considering that Visa has an estimated operations cost of $11.6 billion, the company walks away with at least $24 billion. That said, the real cost we should be interested in would be infrastructure, which is estimated to be just $1.8 billion. Visa spends more on personnel costs, marketing, general and administrative expenses than it does for its technology-related expenses.

My comparison to Bitcoin was to try to identify if Bitcoin cost more as a payment system than Visa.

Bitcoin network handled nearly 500,000 transactions per day in 2024, totaling approximately 182.5 million transactions for the year.

While the number of Bitcoin transactions is significantly lower than Visa's, the total value settled on the Bitcoin network in 2024 was over $19 trillion.

That's more value than Visa settled for less than 200 million transactions.

Evidently, bitcoin costs users and miners more than Visa costs to run. But it remains an unfair comparison considering that Bitcoin, and every other crypto blockchains are databases whose integrity is maintained through monetary incentives. Plus, bitcoin is expensive because their community wants that, we have cheaper alternatives.

That said, blockchains offer an opportunity to decentralized the web and technology landscape in entirety. Certainly, it should cost more when looking at the data broadly. If we look at ETH for instance, we are looking at a variety of transaction types, certainly not regular Visa-grade transactions.

Blockchain being low-cost holds true because in comparison, it's enables not just wide-range of services without choking out consumers but also an economic system that sets the stage for a power shift globally.

Digitalization is the future and with blockchain in the picture, we have an unique opportunity to not become slaves under an economy backed by technology. The government will want you to believe that blockchain is an expensive alternative to your banking system, but in reality, we are dealing with a system that will completely change how we move not just money, but information.

It's not just cheaper to banks, it's a cheaper way of life.

Posted Using INLEO