You have probably heard of Bitcoin, but do you truly understand how the technology behind it can change the way we relate to people, companies, money, and institutions as a whole?
Blockchain
Blockchain can be understood as an online, public, and decentralized database, created to make the distribution of information transparent and trustworthy, without the need for an external, centralizing agent to validate the process.
We can therefore say that Blockchain is a decentralized historical record of changes in digital currency ownership. Whenever a transaction occurs, its details are broadcast across the network, forming new blocks of record information. At regular time intervals — in the case of Bitcoin, approximately every 10 minutes — these new transactions are grouped into a block, encrypted, and added to a chain of blocks that also stores past transactions. This is where the name of the technology comes from: blockchain, or "chain of blocks."
"Crypto is the financial aspect of blockchain. Blockchain you can apply to anything in life. In Blockchain we have the recording of truth." John McAfee
The Internet of Value
The name may not be the most evocative, yet Blockchain, or "chain of blocks," has been regarded by experts as the greatest revolution since the advent of the Internet. Or rather, it may be what Don and Alex Tapscott brilliantly called the "Second Era of the Internet" or the "Internet of Value."
Over the past few decades we have had the "Internet of Information": websites, photos, documents, PowerPoint slides, emails, PDFs. Whenever I send a photo or a document, for example, I am not sending the original — I am sending a copy. This brought about a great democratization of information.
The Double-Spend Problem
However, when it comes to assets such as money, financial instruments like stocks and government bonds, or voting rights, sending a copy is not a good idea. If an asset could be copied and replicated indiscriminately, it would lose its intrinsic value.
Blockchain managed to solve this issue, which in the digital world is known as "double spending." The system was brilliantly designed so that if someone attempts to do this (sending, for example, their Bitcoins to two different people at the same time), everyone on the network notices, and one of those transactions is deemed valid while the other is simply disregarded.
The "First Era of the Internet" genuinely propelled the world to a new level in terms of value creation and wealth generation. However, there was no fair distribution of that wealth.
This "Trust Protocol," brilliantly conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto, brings countless opportunities that could help address the growing problem of social inequality through effective income redistribution — or rather, we may truly be able to change the way that income is distributed.
Simple and Revolutionary
Ingeniously designed to be simple and revolutionary, enabling transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure through a public and tamper-proof ledger — that is Blockchain.
With it emerges a New World Economy with infinite possibilities to disrupt current business models, our governments, and the privacy of information.
Did you know…
…seven EU member states — Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain — signed a joint memorandum committing to promote distributed ledger technology to transform their economies and consolidate the region's leadership position in this sector.
…American millionaire Jeffrey Berns, founder and CEO of Blockchains LLC, wants to build a community based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in Nevada (USA).
…NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is examining blockchain technology as a means of ensuring the privacy and security of aircraft flight data.
…gaming giant Atari signed a licensing agreement with blockchain startup Animoca Brands to create blockchain versions of two popular mobile games.
Bruno Rocio (Co-founder of Evolue Chain) – Entrepreneur, Attorney, Financial Planner, CFP®, Bitcoin Advocate and Open Blockchain Enthusiast
Learn a little more…
By Alexandre Leite
Satoshi Nakamoto's paper proposing Bitcoin as a solution to the double-spend problem in decentralized currencies does not cite blockchain at any point. However, the word "chain" is mentioned 27 times. The idea of creating a truly decentralized currency did not originate with Bitcoin. Other attempts failed either because they relied on trust in a validator or because they were not sufficiently secure against malicious attacks.
The innovation introduced by Nakamoto was the blockchain, a data structure consisting of a linked list connected through hash pointers. Each element of this structure consists of a block of transactions, composing a ledger of the entire history of Bitcoin. These blocks are produced, on average, every 10 minutes, since the network went live on 01/09/2009, with virtually zero interruptions during that period — a remarkable achievement.
What ensures Bitcoin's security is the proof of work performed by miners. For a block to be considered valid by the network, its hash must have a value lower than the target, which decreases as the difficulty increases. This difficulty is adjusted by the network as more miners enter the business, in order to offset the increase in the network's computational power. Today, the cost of mining a block is estimated at over 3,000 dollars, depending on the cost of the required electrical energy and the production of ASICs — chips specially designed to execute SHA256, the algorithm used in Bitcoin mining.
Source: Startse