Welcome to #bigdreams and the #landofthewild

2017年6月14日

Today’s society, relies upon transaction of goods and services.
And this is largely dependent upon the handling, storage, safekeeping and delivery of information.

One can argue that if the delivery of goods and services were to cease, civilization as we know it would be altered dramatically.

In order to exchange this information, intermediaries are needed. The intermediaries create the network through which information is passed along.

One day, Satoshi Nakamoto, had this disturbing, or, as we like to call it today, this disruptive thought. ‘’How can we create a new type of system, enclosed and worldwide, which will allow us to make transactions without the use of so-called trusted intermediaries, such as governments and banks?’’

Something disruptive, as we call it today, is an element which has the potential of profoundly upsetting the current order of things, in whatever domain, without causing drastic change by force. Instead, by being adopted by a large number of users, it creates a self-generating momentum which, as a result, causes changes which would be otherwise nearly impossible. A disruptive idea can be compared to a viral concept which, through propagation among users, upsets the current societal equilibrium.

To achieve his vision, he made use of a novel technology, which has been around for a certain number of years, but remains unknown by most people.

This technology allows for the creation of a public record of transactions, whose attributes are security, anonymity, inalterability, and unchangeability. The entirety of this public record is completely digital and never centralised in one location. In today’s world, most records are private. This new type of decentralised depository only consists of public records, visible to all users.

There is the biggest difficulty in trying to understand disruptive technologies. To do so, we must truly make an effort to think differently. Some people can and some people cannot, as much and as hard as they try. Blockchain and bitcoin have this effect on a lot of people, including very knowledgeable people, well positioned in academic, financial, or political fields or professions.

Because bitcoin is made possible because of blockchain, we will speak of blockchain first.

Blockchain, as a depository of information, can be described not as a huge library, filled with millions of volumes, each page of each volume, filled with millions of letters, each letter filled with millions of dots. No. Instead. Picture the following. You can imagine a chain and to start it, you add the first block of information. So far, nothing dramatic has occurred. Next, you had the 2nd block of information, like in a chain, after the 1st block. And you add the 3rd block, after the 2nd, which comes after the first. And so on, and so forth.

Every time that a transaction occurs and information is created and needs to be stored and accessed, this information (related to this particular transaction) is added to the chain, in the form of a block, connected to all the previous blocks, which are all one after another, placed in chronological order, and the end result is an incredibly long liner sequence of blocks of information. Each block contains a digital signature which allows anyone to verify the identity and contents, the digital signature is permanent and transparent and has very high security attributes.

(...)