11. Endnotes and References
12. Index
Blockchain
Blueprint for a New Economy
Melanie Swan
Blockchain
by Melanie Swan
Copyright © 2015 Melanie Swan. All
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978-1-491-92049-7
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Preface
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
that combines BitTorrent peer-to-peer
file sharing1 with public key
cryptography. 2 Since its launch in 2009,
Bitcoin has spawned a group of
imitators—alternative currencies using
the same general approach but with
different optimizations and tweaks.
More important, blockchain technology
could become the seamless embedded
economic layer the Web has never had,
serving as the technological underlay for
payments, decentralized exchange, token
earning and spending, digital asset
invocation and transfer, and smart
contract issuance and execution. Bitcoin
and blockchain technology, as a mode of
decentralization, could be the next major
disruptive technology and worldwide
computing paradigm (following the
mainframe, PC, Internet, and social
networking/mobile phones), with the
potential for reconfiguring all human
activity as pervasively as did the Web.
Currency, Contracts, and
Applications beyond Financial
Markets