Blockchain In The 1980's

explain the internet to someone living in the 1980’s; that is what explaining blockchain is like in 2017. I’m no more qualified to explain how this technology works than your average college student but, for the purposes of this essay, it’s important that I try. Blockchain is important and is going to change the way society interacts with each other, powerful institutions, and the government.

Blockchain, at its fundamental level, is a shared ledger for recording the history of transactions. In most financial interactions, all parties maintain their own ledger. Parties involved in a transaction have to constantly exchange records to ensure the data in their ledgers match. This process is rife with inefficiency and the potential for human error.

Imagine bitcoin is to blockchain as email was to the internet. Bitcoin, while useful, only scratches the surface of the potential of the underlying technology. The permanent blockchain ledger ensures that the correct amount of bitcoin is allocated to the correct owners. Cryptocurrency has been an enormous success in recent years. At the time of writing, the combined market capitalization of Bitcoin, Ether, and Bitcoin cash, the three largest cryptocurrencies, sits just above eighty billion dollars. The cryptocurrency boom has not been lost on the world’s major financial institutions. Nearly all are researching the applications of cryptocurrency and blockchain. In 2017 an estimated fifteen percent of banks already have their own functioning

The rise of social media has created an environment where people can be easily swayed by foreign entities, private interests, and, frankly, anyone with money. Efforts to combat fake news have been mixed and are often tinged with political bias. MediaSifter took the blockchain to develop a solution to this problem. MediaSifter first aggregates news from any all sources on a specific topic, say climate change or politics on the Korean Peninsula. The crowd subsequently investigates the veracity of each article and provides sources or counter-sources for a given article. Users are compensated with cryptocurrency for providing consistent, accurate, and relevant sources. The crowd looks into all the evidence behind an article determines the reliability of the news. Poorly sourced, dishonest, and outright false stories are pushed out of the aggregator and the supplier of the news is “scored” on each of its articles. The determination of the quality of an article can only be determined by hard evidence. With projects like MediaSifter, blockchain is providing us with an opportunity to fight back against deterioration of quality