The WIRED Guide to the Blockchain — from wired.com by Klint Finley
It’s super secure and slightly hard to understand, but the idea of creating tamper-proof databases has captured the attention of everyone from anarchist techies to staid bankers.
Excerpts:
Depending on who you ask, blockchains are either the most important technological innovation since the internet or a solution looking for a problem.
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It’s too early to say which experiments will work out or whether the results of successful experiments will resemble the bitcoin blockchain. But the idea of creating tamper-proof databases has captured the attention of everyone from anarchist techies to staid bankers.
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The Future of Blockchain
Despite the blockchain hype—and many experiments—there’s still no “killer app” for the technology beyond currency speculation. And while auditors might like the idea of immutable records, as a society we don’t always want records to be permanent.
Blockchain proponents admit that it could take a while for the technology to catch on. After all, the internet’s foundational technologies were created in the 1960s, but it took decades for the internet to become ubiquitous.
That said, the idea could eventually show up in lots of places. For example, your digital identity could be tied to a token on a blockchain. You could then use that token to log in to apps, open bank accounts, apply for jobs, or prove that your emails or social-media messages are really from you. Future social networks might be built on connected smart contracts that show your posts only to certain people or enable people who create popular content to be paid in cryptocurrencies. Perhaps the most radical idea is using blockchains to handle voting. The team behind the open source project Soverign built a platform that organizations, companies, and even governments can already use to gather votes on a blockchain.