OKX Blockchain 60 Lectures | Episode 30: What's the Relationship Between Bitcoin and Blockchain?
Hello everyone, I'm Xiao K. Today we're going to cover: "What's the relationship between Bitcoin and blockchain?"
Bitcoin and blockchain share a deep origin story — the application technology of blockchain was created specifically to bring the cryptocurrency concept to life, and it is precisely because of blockchain as the underlying foundation that Bitcoin's payment vision became a reality. To summarize in one sentence: blockchain was born out of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is itself an application of blockchain.
In the very beginning, the concept of cryptocurrency was proposed by a group of technical visionaries who were already exploring ways to implement cryptocurrency. For example, the earliest cryptocurrency, e-gold, began operations in 1996, two years before the now globally renowned payment giant PayPal. There were also other early cryptocurrency explorations such as Digital Monetary Trust and Ven — all early pioneers, but unfortunately they all ended in failure.
However, during the period from 1990 to 2007, as geeks continued to explore, many technologies advanced by leaps and bounds. For instance, in 1997, cryptographer Adam Back designed Hash Cash, laying the foundation for the PoW consensus mechanism. In 1998, Szabo proposed the smart contract theory. Between 1999 and 2001, Napster, eDonkey2000, and BitTorrent emerged one after another, establishing the foundation for P2P network computing. The core technologies of blockchain were all introduced during this period.
It wasn't until 2008, with the birth of Bitcoin, that encrypted cryptography was established as the mainstream approach for cryptocurrency. It was also around this time that the concept of cryptocurrency became widely known to the public. Bitcoin has had a tremendous impact on today's blockchain ecosystem, because in the process of implementing Bitcoin, Nakamoto endowed blockchain with one particularly important property: decentralization.
Originally, Bitcoin's creator Nakamoto simply wanted to design a cryptocurrency, but when designing the underlying data infrastructure, he made a very important decision: abandoning the traditional centralized database model, and based on the work of predecessors, designed a strongly decentralized underlying mechanism. This mechanism allows everyone to participate, with equal rights, no interference from centralized teams or institutions, and once data is recorded, it is completely immutable. This characteristic enabled Bitcoin to achieve truly decentralized teamless operations.
As time went on, people realized that the advantages of Bitcoin's mechanism were becoming increasingly apparent — even after the founder disappeared, it could continue to operate stably. Therefore, this underlying mechanism was extracted from Bitcoin for independent study, giving rise to what we now call blockchain technology.
Overall, Bitcoin and blockchain share a chicken-and-egg relationship — it is precisely because of the existence of blockchain that Bitcoin can continue to operate smoothly, and it is precisely because Bitcoin serves as an application that we can unveil the veil of blockchain and enter the blockchain 1.0 era represented by cryptocurrency.
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