Technology Guru

These days it’s hard to avoid pronouncements about how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology could  change everything (or at least, create  massive wealth ). Yet there’s an equally loud chorus labeling them a  massive scam ,  useless , and  dangerous . And a surprisingly large audience still doesn’t understand what’s going on. One big reason for the confusion is that we’re not all talking about the same things. The truth is that there isn’t a blockchain phenomenon to be for or against. There are three. The three communities share a basic set of design principles and technological foundations — but the people, goals, and prospects are almost completely distinct. Those involved don’t help much by sniping constantly about which is the “real” movement. So, let me try to clarify things. There is  cryptocurrency:  the idea that networks can securely transfer value without central points of control. There is  blockchain : the idea t...

Nearly 60 years ago,  Gordon Moore , the co-founder of Intel, coined " Moore's Law ," a prediction that would set the pace for the digital revolution. The law stated that computing abilities, over time, would radically increase in power while decreasing in relative cost, all at an exponential rate. This insight, along with the hard work of many computer scientists and engineers, has fueled the rapid growth of the technology sector. The industry has quickly become a staple component of our modern economy. The five biggest technology companies (Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) together made up a whopping  37 percent of the S&P 500's total gains  in 2017. Federal investments in the digital sector could  reach up to $95 billion  in the coming year. And, internationally, the public will  spend up to $3.4 trillion  on digital services by 2020. Consumers and enterprises have a lot of potentials to look forward to, as frontier ...

The hype around blockchain is massive. To hear the blockchain hype train tell it, blockchain will now: Solve income inequality Make all data secure forever Make everything much more efficient and trustless Save dying babies What the heck is a blockchain, anyway? And can it really do all these things? Can blockchain bring something amazing to industries as diverse as healthcare, finance, supply chain management and music rights? And doesn’t being for Bitcoin mean that you’re pro-blockchain? How can you be for Bitcoin but say anything bad about the technology behind it? In this article, I seek to answer a lot of these questions by looking at what a blockchain is and more importantly, what it’s not. What is a blockchain? To examine some of these claims, we have to define what a blockchain is and herein lies a lot of the confusion. Many companies use the word “blockchain” to mean some sort of magical device by which all their data will never be wrong. Such a device, of...

"The practical consequence [...is...] for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate." - Marc Andreessen From a cruising altitude, a blockchain might not look that different from things you're familiar with, says Wikipedia. With a blockchain, many people can write entries into a record of information, and a community of users can control how the record of information is amended and updated. Likewise, Wikipedia entries are not the product of a single publisher. No one person controls the information. Descending to ground level, however, the differences that make blockchain technology unique become more clear. While both run on distributed networks (the internet), ...