by
Ramin Mazaheri
Part
3 - Block chain – it’s going to change a lot of things, and I
mean A LOT
What is
bitcoin?
Well, that
is not really the key question. Most people know it is a
“crypto-currency”, an e-currency, a cyber-currency, etc.
The key
question is: what makes this product special, right? The answer is:
bitcoin is when “block chain” technology was unveiled.
“Bitcoin”
is just the main product name out there right now, but “block chain
technology” is being described as a “foundational” technology.
Like…the wheel, or the internet.
This link
explains block chain technology from a purely scientific perspective.
But if you don’t have 10 minutes or a fast internet connection…:
In a few
sentences: It’s a decentralized ledger system. To give an example:
you pay Visa, and Visa records the transaction on their ledger. Visa
has the only copy – it is centralized. With block chain, you have a
chain of thousands of computers all verifying your transaction and
making that record public – there are thousands of permanent
copies.
It is open,
it is communal, it relies on consensus and it takes away the power of
Visa by ending their monopoly over the information. Monopolies create
opportunities for corruption, especially private monopolies, which
have no government oversight to protect the People. Who does not
already view banks and credit cards as havens of corruption?
People
predict that block chain technology will revolutionize innumerable
fields like, for example, music royalties, making it actually
possible to earn a living at making music: 10 million computers will
be monitoring all the world’s radio stations, and Lionel Ritchie’s
“Dancing on the Ceiling” is played by 97.9 WLUP FM radio in
Chicago. Then, 9.8 million computers will correctly register and
confirm among each other that Lionel Ritchie’s “Dancing on the
Ceiling” was just played, and thus Lionel is owed a royalty by 97.9
WLUP. The current system is: 97.9 FM WLUP tells the royalty companies
they played “Dancing on the Ceiling”…and just trust them that
they only played it once that day. Or it’s something not too far
from that. The point is: no SINGLE computer is responsible for
holding the information in block chain, and the permanent record is
perpetually public…unless the entire world decides to ban the
internet/stop using electricity.
This also
has great potential for the way we vote: 10,000 computers will
examine an electronic ballot and agree on its validity. If some
hacker tries to force in 900,000 votes for Ramin Mazaheri, 98% of the
computers will correctly realize that this is not a valid vote and
signal that the system has been breached. While good governance
certainly loses out in this particular scenario, at least democracy
will be upheld.
But what
appears clear is that there have been enough technological
breakthroughs in computing to give rise to a revolutionary new
process (block chain). It’s like Ford creating the assembly
line…for publicly-monitored high-speed computing. Block chain is
the technological/philosophical breakthrough, and applying that to
the financial process and ending their current monopoly is what
bitcoiners are investing in.
So bitcoins
are not the big deal – block chain is. I would say that if you
don’t see the big deal about block chain, then you don’t see why
Bitcoin is different. So learn a bit more and think about it –
you’ll see that by making everything permanently public, the public
wins instead of the moneyed class.
Source,
links:
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