VISION: NEXT GENERATION, BLOCKCHAIN
Futurist Alvin Toffler proposed sea changes in society based around adaption of new technologies. The 1st wave is the agricultural revolution; the 2nd wave is the industrial revolution; and the 3rd wave is the information revolution. We are currently seeing the culmination of the 3rd wave, perhaps even a 4th wave, as distributed networks fundamentally alter the way people earn a living, learn about the world, and form social bonds.
One of these distributed networks reshaping the world of finance and financial technology fields is the ‘Blockchain’. Blockchain technology is the underpinning of ‘Bitcoin’, a cryptocurrency developed by unknown programmer Satoshi Nakamoto. The revolutionary feature of crypto-currencies is that they are not controlled by any governments or centralizing organizations.
The crypto-currency is decentralized currency; therefore, the radical problem of fiat-currency which centralized by the government has been removed.
Before the epidemic of ‘Bitcoin Fever’, related technology developers attempted to build and to commercialize crypto-currencies, but commercializing the crypto-currency was unsuccessful. To be acknowledged as a currency, the developed currency must be used by a vast number of people, but crypto-currency could not obtain enough attention from the public. Meanwhile the fiat-currency values have faltered by the sequence of adverse events.
The public shifted their interest toward the ‘decentralized currency’. Bitcoin distinguishes from the fiat currency with three features: decentralized currency, high transparency, and safe from hacking.
The implementation of the blockchain in Bitcoin achieved decentralization with safety and transparency. The rapid adoption of Bitcoin, even to the point of a ‘Bitcoin fever’, has shown the global appetite for a decentralized currency, and the new launched ICOs show the robustness of both the business models and technologies in a blockchain.
Since the first blockchain is created by Satoshi Nakamoto in August of 2014, Bitcoin creates a new block every ten minutes. The blockchain has distinguishing features such as P2P (peer-topeer) network, consensus algorithm, hash function, etc. At its heart the blockchain is a ledger kept up-to-date by the community who use it. Every time new transactions are recorded they are appended to the end of the blockchain, and the ledger continues to grow. Through these features the blockchain technology has been acknowledged to be the most innovative technology which will lead us to another stage of future technology.
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