Massachusetts Institute of Technology has setup its own digital currency department and in my view this is a harbinger of the coming importance of this new worldwide ecosystem. Here is what MIT says:
“The Digital Currency Initiative is a group at MIT focusing on cryptocurrency and its underlying technologies. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin enable open, trustless digital payments and contracts. In the spirit of the Internet’s wide reach, this technology, and the people behind it, have the potential to impact billions of people and become a crucial part of daily life. We seek to push the envelope on the development of this technology with fundamental research, while shedding light on the associated benefits, risks, and ethical quandaries. Beyond research centered at MIT, we also help support open-source cryptocurrency communities and diversity, and hope to foster broader academic community in this space.”
Use Cases
Blockchain will enable a radical change in how things are currently done on the internet, that ultimately means decentralizing what is currently available. According to MIT, these fields include healthcare and medical records, global rights management, decentralized publishing, user controlled credit identities, digital currency at central banks, securitized financing for solar microgrids. What they did not mention are real estate, law, online gaming, travel, crowd funding, e-commerce, and just about every other niche that could be decentralized. This is clearly a revolutionary new technology that has been created since Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper in 2008. You can read the original white paper here.
The 4th Industrial Revolution
It has been said that we are in the 4th industrial revolution. With the inception of Bitcoin, there has been an explosion of competing ideas on different platforms written in different coding language. There are well over 1,000 ideas and many of these are just that-conceptual. Some of these are actively used such as Bitcoin and Etherium. The space is not stranger to jokes & scams as many of these so called “currencies” have ridiculous use cases but have managed to raise significant amounts of money in a very short period of time. This has led to suspicion by many who are new to the space and rightfully so, but we cannot deny the technology behind some of these projects.
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