Blockchain

Preface

We should think about the blockchain as another class of thing like the Internet—a comprehensive information technology with tiered technical levels and multiple classes of applications for any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money; hard assets (physical property, homes, cars); and intangible assets (votes, ideas, reputation, intention, health data, information, etc.). But the blockchain concept is even more; it is a new organizing paradigm for the discovery, valuation, and transfer of all quanta (discrete units) of anything, and potentially for the coordination of all human activity at a much larger scale than has been possible before.

We may be at the dawn of a new revolution. This revolution started with a new fringe economy on the Internet, an alternative currency called Bitcoin that was issued and backed not by a central authority, but by automated consensus among networked users. Its true uniqueness, however, lay in the fact that it did not require the users to trust each other. Through algorithmic self-policing, any malicious attempt to defraud the system would be rejected. In a precise and technical definition, Bitcoin is digital cash that is transacted via the Internet in a decentralized trustless system using a public ledger called the blockchain. It is a new form of money that combines BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing¹ with public key cryptography.² Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin has spawned ...