Valery Vavilov, co-founder and CEO of BitFury, has published an article where he offers to “educate and inform” the public about the most fundamental facts concerning bitcoin and its distributed ledger.

In the post on Medium, Vavilov outlines five things which in his view define the bitcoin system and make it far superior to all other proprietary blockchains in the world.

1. Before bitcoin, everything was transferrable via the internet except assets. The first blockchain brought the solution and opened countless possibilities in moving value across the globe.

2. The bitcoin blockchain is secure.

3. The bitcoin blockchain is helpful to law enforcement agencies – it facilitates detecting of criminal activity.

4. Private blockchains cannot compete with the bitcoin one due to its scale and level of security.

5. The bitcoin blockchain helps to protect savings of private people as well as their rights and, therefore, is a true safeguard of democracy.

Talking about security, Vavilov emphasises that the bitcoin blockchain is one of the most protected computer networks in the world. Smaller-scale private blockchains lack the most valued property of their bitcoin prototype – immutability provided by its enormous size and consolidated computing power. Vavilov draws a line: “There is one Blockchain. It is the Bitcoin Blockchain. Just as there is one Internet.”

It is remarkable that Vavilov considers the anonymity traditionally attributed to bitcoin and perceived by many users as its greatest advantage as “greatly exaggerated”. He explains that though users remain anonymous on the blockchain, all their actions are recorded in a searchable and unalterable ledger and therefore easily traceable. Besides, the bitcoin blockchain enables fiscal authorities to follow all money movements, which is impossible with cash. And three more characteristics make the bitcoin ledger beneficial for law enforcers: it is permanent (all data is available at any time), publicly accessible (no special legal process is required to access the data) and borderless (no agreements with foreign governments are needed).

BitFury is the leading bitcoin infrastructure producer and transaction processing company founded in 2011, with management offices in Washington DC and Amsterdam. The company owns data centres in Iceland and Georgia.

Anna Lavinskaya