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3 Blockchain Breakthroughs You Should Know About

In this video Joe Scott outlines the Brave browser and “Basic Attention Token” (BAT), which is an open-source, decentralized ad exchange platform based on Ethereum.

The Chainlink network is also discussed, which provides reliable tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network provides the same security guarantees as smart contracts themselves. By allowing multiple Chainlinks to evaluate the same data before it becomes a trigger, we eliminate any one point of failure and maintain the overall value of a smart contract that is highly secure, reliable, and trustworthy.

It also discusses The Lightning Network, which is a “Layer 2” payment protocol that operates on top of a blockchain-based cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin). It enables fast transactions between participating nodes and has been touted as a solution to the Bitcoin scalability problem. It features a peer-to-peer system for making micropayments of cryptocurrency through a network of bidirectional payment channels without delegating custody of funds.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Contracts

Smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman. The best way to describe smart contracts is to compare the technology to a vending machine.

Ordinarily, you would go to a lawyer or a notary, pay them, and wait while you get the document. With smart contracts, you simply drop a bitcoin into the vending machine (i.e. ledger), and your escrow, driver’s license, or whatever drops into your account. More so, smart contracts not only define the rules and penalties around an agreement in the same way that a traditional contract does, but also automatically enforce those obligations.

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Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

A short film about the rise of Decentralized Autonomous Organization with narration by Shermin Voshmgir.

Blockchain is, I would say, not only a technological revolution but first and foremost a socio-economic revolution. The blockchain is a tool to bring us into a more decentralized world.

Why can we disrupt organizations with blockchain? In order to understand this we need to understand the history of the internet.

So if we look back the first generation Internet, in the early 90s, revolutionized information. This is why we called it the information data highway.

About ten years later we have the so-called web 2.0 – the internet became more mature, more programmable and all of a sudden we had on the one hand social media platforms and on the other hand a peer-to-peer economy where the consumer and the producer came, closer to each other of information of opinion of goods and services.

So the original vision of the internet was to be a decentralized world where everyone could put information online.

But in the web, it became very centralized with those platforms. It brought us this peer-to-peer economy but with this huge man in the middle this platform in the middle who started to control all the data and dictates the rules of transactions of that platform.

So instead of the internet becoming more decentralized it became more centralized, and what we’re doing now with blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and all these other technologies of the decentralized web, is we are redesigning data structures given the fact that we are already living in the connected world. If we think of blockchain in the context of the internet it is the driving technology behind the decentralized web, or also called the Web 3.

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Blockchain Explained

Blockchain is a distributed and immutable ledger allowing you to track anything, including tangible or intangible goods. This enables users or organizations to digitally and securely record entries, that are in-turn endorsed and secured by a community of users.

Sai Vennam from IBM Cloud takes a deep dive into blockchain technology and covers everything from smart contracts to permissioned and permissionless blockchains

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The Case for Decentralization

Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talks about the history of computing, blockchain, crypto, smart contracts and the case for decentralization.

The killer apps for blockchain have yet to be developed. Blockchain is transparent and open source.

We’re entering a golden era of creativity via better trust properties and community owned and operated digital services.