Technology Guru

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), ...

What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a digital payment system created by an unknown programmer, or a group of programmers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It is the first decentralized digital currency. Bitcoins are digital coins, you can send over the internet. Compared to other choices, bitcoin have many advantages. They are transferred straight from person to another via Internet without going to the bank. It means that the transactions fees are extremely lower, anyone can use them in every country, the account cannot be frozen and there are no limits. How does it work? Many currency exchanges exist on the Internet where you can buy and sell bitcoins. Your coins are saved in your digital wallet on your computer or mobile device or any online wallet. Sending and receiving Bitcoins is as easy as sending and receiving email, you can buy anything with Bitcoin. When it comes to the transaction it generates a first Bitcoin address, something like an email, which acts in ...