What exactly IS Blockchain? Blockchain Technology Explained [VIDEO]

This video gives an interesting, easy-to-follow explanation of “blockchain” technology, including what exactly it is and it’s potential impact to the tech landscape.

Below are some choice quotes that stuck out to me and quickly help convey some key concepts:

“What is Blockchain? A shared trusted, secure database; se. can enable inter-organizational collaboration”

“You can get from small to large by centralizing, but you get from large to infinite by distributing. And that’s what blockchain can do for this next 3d generation internet.”—Blockchain Technology Explained youtube video

“The interesting part of the blockchain is really in what it enables in terms of new forms of distributed organization.”

“Blockchain is an institutional technology not an information technology, there is an enormous difference between the two, institutional revolutions are things that don’t happen very often.”

“Blockchain technology enables new forms of network distributed organizations. Something that runs contrary to the existing organizational paradigm.  It is a shift from the industrial way of organization. Industrial way of organizational thinking was centralization, mass production, and economies of scale.  The technologies of the Industrial Age selectively favored centralization of production within closed higher up organizations.  i.e.—Manufacturing is in centralized factories, transport systems are centralized around transport hubs, education within schools and universities,  entertainment centralized within mass media organizations and government centralized within state-run organizations and so-on.”

“The information revolution is in the process of taking us into a new world of distributed networks as the organizational paradigm of the information age.  The combination of telecommunications networks and computerized coordination enables us to replace centralized management within closed hierarchies with open networks.  As the underlying technology matures we’re able to convert more and more systems that were previously closed and centralized and have them managed through automated networks. And the blockchain is just one more stage in this process.”

“What centralized organization enabled was trust, coordination and cooperation within organizations, but what the blockchain enables is trust, coordination and cooperation between organizations and between individuals peer-to-peer.”

“The end result of this new institutional technology is a much greater capacity for inter-organizational collaboration and powerful ecosystems that are greater than the sum of their parts.”

Distributed Ledgers

“The blockchain is like another layer to the internet that enables secure trusted records and transactions between people who may not otherwise trust each other. The trust is in the technology, computer code and mathematics, rather than people and centralized institutions. In this respect, people sometimes talk about the blockchain as a trust machine in its capacity to enable a network where trust is created by design, its built in to the system automatically. Because the blockchain creates a trusted database it can function as a record of value storage and exchange. These  records of value and transactions may be called ledgers.”

“Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT”

“A distributed ledger can be described as a ledger of any transactions or contracts supported by a decentralized network from across different locations and people, elimination the need of a central authority.”

Smart Contracts

“One of the key technology innovations of 2nd generation blockchains has been the development of what are called ‘smart contracts’. Smart contracts are computer code stored inside of a blockchain, which encode contractual agreements. Smart contracts are self-executing with the terms of the agreement or operation directly written into lines of code, stored and executed on the blockchain computer.”

Advantages: Smart contracts are automatic, incorruptible, bring independence and deliver certainty.

Disadvantages: They dependent upon formal rules with well specified inputs and leave little room for a multiplicity of eventualities.

Distributed Applications

“The advent of the Ethereal platform in 2015 has worked to provide a virtual computing infrastructure for running applications on blockchain. This new form of program is called a distributed application or DAPP for short.”

“Ethereum, was the first developer platform for building distributed applications. It was a foundational general-purpose blockchain based platform that is a Turing-complete virtual machine, meaning that it can run any computer code.”

Distributed Application (Dapp)-“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.”

Dapp’s are open source, autonomous, and secure.

Internet of Value

“Because the BC is a secure system that enables a trusted net work it is often described as a value exchange protocol.  What the web did for the exchange of information the bc will do 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 too the BC is said to do the same for the recording and exchanging of all forms of quantifiable value.”

The entire video is extremely informative for the uninitiated and can be found here.