Martin Hagelstrom is a bitcoin enthusiast and project executive and consultant working on IT projects at IBM.
In this opinion piece, Hagelstrom analyzes CoinDesk articles from 2015 and 2016 to showcase the seismic shift in language used in the bitcoin and blockchain space and discusses how the community should react to this change. We all should know by now that 2016 will be blockchain’s biggest year yet, and for good reason – financial incumbents are finding very clever ways to start investing and testing this technology without the fear of fueling what they perceive as a threat to their business models.
The key to this transition has been the rebranding of distributed ledgers and digital currencies under the larger banner term "blockchain", a word that has become so common , it is suffering from a bit of fatigue.
But the admittedly vague term, "blockchain", also comes without the bad publicity that still surrounds discussions of digital currencies, most notably bitcoin. And let’s be fair to the poor person who has to actually ask the board of directors for money. "Anonymous" and "unregulated" aren’t the most popular concepts in highly regulated industries.
However, this article is not about identifying the right approach to rebranding the industry; if private blockchains are secure or not; or whether they will really change the financial services business model.
It’s about how "blockchain" has become the most repeated word on the cryptocurrency world, even more than bitcoin, and about what we can do as a community once we accept this. A look at the numbers
To underscore this point, here’s a word cloud generated by analyzing CoinDesk’s articles published over the past month.
As an experiment, I decided to drill down and analyzed all the articles where blockchain was part of the title this March and repeated this process […]
