Blockchain 15: Blockchain & Society

Peer-to-peer networked forms of social organization have always been there from the earliest days, however, previously they have remained the domain of the local and the personal as they do not scale well without supporting communications technology.

Throughout the modern era, formal hierarchical social structures came to replace informal communities as the dominant organizational paradigm. It is only in the past decades that we have seen the emergence of a new form of social structure that reverses this process, the social network. With the advent of blockchain technologies, these forms of distributed organization are presented with an opportunity to sustain more and more areas of social life, establishing themselves as a core pillar of a world where peer-to-peer is the way forward.

Blockchain 13: Technology and the Internet of Things

As we move from the technology paradigm of the industrial age characterized by machines and stand-alone mechanical systems, a new class of technology is emerging. Namely, the Internet of Things (IoT), which promises to revolutionize human life at unprecedented levels.

The Internet of Things is a journey we are just beginning. Over the course of the next decade billions of devices will come online. The amount of data the internet has to deal with will grow massively as vast networks of machines continuously communicate with each other, to coordinate production processes, for transport and logistics, for construction, climate control etc.

Coupled with blockchain, IoT could find a bright future in enabling mashes of smart devices to safely navigate the sea of data we produce while achieving a varied of tasks.

Blockchain 12: Blockchain Economy

As with other areas, the blockchain has the capacity to decentralize economic organization creating distributed peer-to-peer networks for exchange. In so doing, greatly expand the scope and extent of economic markets and finance. And using the blockchain as an infrastructure to expand the opportunities of the global market economy to all is critical to enabling social sustainability through inclusion.

Blockchain 11: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

This video explains the idea of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and talks about the current context surrounding the term.

A decentralized autonomous organization is an organization that is run by rules that are created by their members through a consensus process and then written into a set of contracts that are run via computer code, thus enabling the automated management of a distributed organization.

Blockchain 10: Token Economies

A new set of web technologies are enabling a more distributed economic model based upon the blockchain and token markets. These token markets greatly reduce our dependency on centralized organizations and expand markets as systems of distributed organization. In this video we explain the workings of the blockchain, tokens, distributed markets and token investments.

Blockchain 9: Internet of Value

Because the blockchain is a secure system that enables a trusted network it may be described as a value-exchange protocol. In this respect, it is often said that what the web did for the exchange of information the blockchain does for the exchange of value. Just as the web revolutionized the use and exchange of information within society disrupting whole industries based upon the centralization of information, so to the blockchain is set to do the same for the recording and exchange of all forms of quantifiable value.

Blockchain 8: Distributed Applications

A Dapp is an application that runs on a network in a distributed fashion with participant information securely protected and operations executed in a decentralized fashion across a network of nodes. Dapps use open source code, operate autonomously with data and records cryptographically stored on a blockchain

Blockchain 7: Smart Contracts

One of the key technological innovations of blockchain 2.0 has been the development of what are called smart contracts. Smart contracts are computer code that are stored inside of a blockchain which encodes contractual agreements. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement or operation directly written into lines of code which are stored and executed on the blockchain computer.