5 CONCLUSION The Bitcoin creators’ intention was to develop a decentralized cash-like electronic payment system. In this process, they faced the fundamental challenge of how to establish and transfer digital property rights of a monetary unit without a central authority. They solved this challenge by inventing the Bitcoin Blockchain. This novel technology allows us to store and transfer a monetary unit without the need for a central authority, similar to cash. Price volatility and scaling issues frequently raise concerns about the suitability of Bitcoin as a payment instrument. As an asset, however, Bitcoin and alternative blockchain-based tokens should not be neglected. The innovation makes it possible to represent digital property without the need for a central authority. This can lead to the creation of a new asset class that can mature into a valuable portfolio diversification instrument. Moreover, blockchain technology provides an infrastructure that enables numerous applications. Promising applications include using colored coins, smart contracts, and the possibility of using fingerprints to secure the integrity of data files in a blockchain, which may bring change to the world of finance and to many other sectors.
I also like this think piece by the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html
Like the original internet itself, the blockchain is an idea with radical — almost communitarian — possibilities that at the same time has attracted some of the most frivolous and regressive appetites of capitalism. We spent our first years online in a world defined by open protocols and intellectual commons; we spent the second phase in a world increasingly dominated by closed architectures and proprietary databases. We have learned enough from this history to support the hypothesis that open works better than closed, at least where base-layer issues are concerned. But we don’t have an easy route back to the open-protocol era. Some messianic next-generation internet protocol is not likely to emerge out of Department of Defense research, the way the first-generation internet did nearly 50 years ago.
Yes, the blockchain may seem like the very worst of speculative capitalism right now, and yes, it is demonically challenging to understand. But the beautiful thing about open protocols is that they can be steered in surprising new directions by the people who discover and champion them in their infancy. Right now, the only real hope for a revival of the open-protocol ethos lies in the blockchain. Whether it eventually lives up to its egalitarian promise will in large part depend on the people who embrace the platform, who take up the baton, as Juan Benet puts it, from those early online pioneers. If you think the internet is not working in its current incarnation, you can’t change the system through think-pieces and F.C.C. regulations alone. You need new code.
Submitted January 18, 2018 at 04:21PM by Howontimearethebuses http://ift.tt/2DrCnwI
