Betting on Blockchain

Blockchain technology was introduced in 2008 with the advent of Bitcoin. It solved the problem of digital cash by creating a method that didn’t rely on third-party intermediaries. The term "blockchain" refers to an indelible chain of blocks, where once information is inserted into one block, it remains there. Blockchain technology also offers public verifiability and reliance on cryptographic methods to achieve goals in clearing payments and verifying transactions. Currently, organizations like Tezos Foundation and Protocol Labs are working towards moving this technology forward. Tezos aims to solve the problem of upgrading blockchain technology by enabling coordination among users and decentralizing power structures that control the internet. It also seeks to innovate on formal verification of core base protocols to make applications more accessible. On the other hand, Protocol Labs is working on IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), a decentralized hypermedia protocol that aims to rethink the stack for how the web works by using content addressing rather than location addressing and peer-to-peer structure. This could lead to a utopian decentralized market where storage is a proper commodity, allowing ISPs to participate in cloud storage. The power of decentralization can be applied to various sectors such as finance, law, investment banking, and even social media platforms like Twitter. However, the tech still has to catch up with modern standards in terms of user experience and quality of platform. Decentralized consensus protocols like mining are used to propose values for the head of the chain, where a bunch of parties agree upon what that value is. In the future, proof of stake algorithms may replace proof of work systems, creating new incentive structures based on how many tokens one has. Governance of these systems will evolve dramatically over the next years.