As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies soared in popularity late last year, a misguided, ignorant, and, quite frankly, annoying ethos emerged from Wall Street: blockchain not Bitcoin. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he’d fire any of his employees who traded Bitcoin and called it a fraud, but then stated that “blockchain is real.” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed demand for Bitcoin comes only from money laundering but said he believes in blockchain. Scores of articles in the mainstream media praise blockchain but take a tepid stance toward Bitcoin.

They’re missing the point.

When you send something over the Internet, for instance a memo in a PDF file, the receiving party does not actually receive that same memo. Instead, your computer makes a copy of the PDF file and then sends that copy to the receiver. Anything on the Internet, like a copyrighted, digital piece of art, can be duplicated and sent around. This makes the original version pretty much valueless compared to its value in the physical world. This is why Napster, the peer-to-peer audio sharing service that facilitated music piracy, posed such a serious threat to the music industry.

Blockchains, on the other hand, allow you to send the unique, original version, eliciting the key innovation here: digital scarcity. This means two parties can digitally transfer something of value while ensuring that only the receiver owns that version after the transaction. This can only be done online currently with a host of middlemen facilitating the transaction and taking a fee. Just as the Internet’s killer application is communication, blockchain’s killer application is value transfer, specifically money transfer. Email was the Internet’s first, and most widely used, communication implementation, and Bitcoin is blockchain’s first, and most widely used, value transfer implementation.

The current financial system relies on inefficiency. To send money right now, you need a bank or another intermediary to settle a transaction, which often costs a 2–3% transaction fee and takes several business days. Bitcoin poses a threat to incumbent financial institutions; it allows you to become your own bank. You don’t need someone else to settle your transaction, meaning you no longer need to pay a fee for inefficiency. Bitcoin can lower the barrier to entry into the financial system for billions of unbanked people in developing countries, while also greatly reducing the cost of doing business in the developed world.

At its core, bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, censorship-resistant currency that can form the basis of a trustless, self-sustaining financial system. Without Bitcoin, a blockchain is a distributed ledger that offers slight improvements over other kinds of databases, mostly related to security. Bitcoin is the revolution that blockchain promises.