Distributed networks, recent impact - Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies, a free look

Introduction

Among the anarcho-punk predictions that William Gibson slips in his 1984 novel, Neuromante, is cyberspace; idea and word that Gibson conceives to give life and place to a world of infinite relationships and electronic transactions, mirror of all material, of all kinds and without which the world would not be the world, confirming that “reality surpasses Fiction".

In line with Gibson and Neuromante, just over 20 years ago, Tim May, one of the many gurus who at that time orbited the future around Microsoft or MIT, illustrated us with first sketches of concepts such as anarcho-encrypted or electronic money ( e-Money).

Not only encrypted was Tim May. He investigated the development of anonymous monetary transactions. New and more efficient authentication and verification algorithms were growing alongside hardware (smart cards or micro encryption chips) while moving their costs to make them massive and ubiquitous throughout.

In parentheses, Kenichi Ohmae in his assertive analysis "The End of the Nation-State" agrees with May in the sense of comparing the connection between the collapse of the Nation-State as we know it and what happened to the feudal order prevailing until 500 years ago. appear the press.

NOTE: Remember that the lords monopolized the information, which in turn was administered by the Church. Thus, when someone tried to process, for example, leather or forge metals outside the feud, they had to pay taxes for the work done. But when the Press appears, and soon treated about the treatment of leather, or techniques that facilitated the forging, the existing control is partly lost favoring the emergence of new guilds, now independent and strategically located to escape feudal control. Although it must have been somewhat expensive to maintain minimum levels of autonomy at the time, today it is not so different when evaluating, for example, how expensive it is to sustain a Bitcoins mining farm, a company itself, just as it was to set sail to find the Indies

What we were in, ah, that encryption technology is already massive and ubiquitous. Not only that. Today is the conjunction of a multiplicity of recent phenomena. All effect of the evolution of history. Stand out; Financialization, 4th industrial revolution, Quantum, Astrophysics, Big Data, VR (Virtual Reality), AI (Artificial Intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things), Nanotechnology, growing automation, Digitalization of the Economy, Blockchain.

see https://hermandadblanca.org/conjuncion-de-fenomenos-recientes-cambio-radical/

For now let's look at the cryptic edge.

Thus, as a first element to take into account, as with the printing press, we will again witness how encryption will erode the current socio-economic-cultural foundations of the world. Whatever the meaning of the change, we know it is with the love of the third ray Mahachochan, in charge of culture, philosophy, arts and culture.

Until now, throughout the world, most of the foundations that support the relations between power and money have kept asymmetries very marked; first, with the complicity of the State and more recently sleepy under the perverse circle of its inorganic and rusty democracies.

Secondly, by way of context, remember that in history we have traveled through millenary pyramid systems that change little until Taylor in 1911 describes the classic hierarchical tree that dominates the landscape since then giving a sense of modernity to the rigid centralist model but that no longer holds. Today we see how open, matrix, deverticalized, distributed, in short, new air models are extended.

Distributed Networks

A network (from a postmodern point of view) is a distributed thing that has no core or clear boundaries. How to control something like that? Encryption delivers a response by providing security to decentralized / distributed systems and keeping them flexible. That is why encryption has become so popular as the basis of a tool for socio-economic change and transformation. Otherwise we would not have Torrents, Uber, Airbnb or cryptocurrencies.

In effect, a network and its decentralization attributes, rather distributed, and flexible, favor the emergence of encryption tools for those who defend private life at all costs. It was a matter of time for technologies that were secretly developed for the arts of war, domination, control and espionage, among others, to reach people.

First, to civil society, in corporations, banking and finance, unleashing what is still read in elitist circles such as "Financialization" or the phenomenon that has extended debt-based economies and what we have witnessed since the 80s.

Today the encryption developers fill unthinkable spaces, because the control that the military exercised over the required technologies, in the same way that the Church once controlled the printing press, is no longer such. Few decades have passed for new encryption models to base today's hyperconnected world with powerful and almost inviolable anonymous trading technologies. One of them is called Blockchain.

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a computer technology that allows any type of transaction between two or more people to be executed reliably and securely over the Internet without the need for intermediaries.

Blockchain is then an articulation of encryption technologies that provides users with protection of their identities and the data of their transactions. It works on a distributed network of machines whose computing power allows the flow of transactions over the network in a safe, reliable and anonymous manner where each machine, or miner, contributes to the encrypted information flow of these transactions and is rewarded in return, generally in Bitcoins.

A common blockchain transaction begins with the sending of a digital asset (usually Bitcoins but today there are hundreds of Cryptocurrencies, including ethereum, ripple or litecoin) from one digital wallet to another. This transaction is monitored by various nodes and grouped with other transactions that those nodes have detected.

The blockchain blockchain is then a digital accounting book where all transactions that occur on the network are recorded, grouped into blocks that are continuously linked linearly with each other, that is: the first block with the second, the second with the third, and so on (hence the name of 'blockchain').

This whole process, which is known as mining, in a blockchain transaction, is transparent to users since the only thing they can see is the amount of confirmations that their transactions receive and the time they take to realize what they finally do. It is supported by the peer to peer peer network - P2P - which facilitates your computers and / or mining hardware.

Thus, the job of the miners is both to collaborate and compete for the answer of the mathematical puzzle that authorizes the miner who finds him to propose his block, with the transactions in it, to be added to the chain.

Blockchain types

Blockchain was conceived as a great accounting book accessible to anyone. However, the development of this technology has divided it into two categories and four types.

Regarding the stored data, there are public or private data. In the first, there is no restriction to read data or perform operations by users; on the other hand, in the second, both reading and operations are limited to users authorized for it.

If we now look at the ability to generate blocks, it is divided into those without permits (permissionless) and with permits (permissioned). In those without permits there are no restrictions to carry out transactions or create new blocks, and therefore coins or digital assets native to the network are offered as a reward to users who want to maintain the network, as in Bitcoin.

Blockchain with permissions are generally developed by private, almost always for internal use, and users need permissions from network administrators to interact with the protocol. Here we can find the type of blockchain that banks are testing, where control is maintained by the organization that develops the network and not by users.

Semantics: The terms that refer to this technology as a database organized in blocks, encrypted and distributed among many users, are usually three:

1. Blockchain Technology

2. Distributed Accounting Technology

3. Bitcoin technology.

However, although they all mean essentially the same thing, they are also used to mention certain specific types of blockchain. That is, they acquire their definition more punctual according to their context.

That is why Blockchain can refer to both the technology as a whole and the original Bitcoin platform or a bank development. The last name Technolog a in general is accompanied by broad contexts and it is not uncommon that it is usually used to refer to public chains, since there is a certain controversy of whether it should ao not be called blockchain to private platforms. Anyway, the use is not exclusive since today the banks use it when they describe their test projects following developers and users.

Blockchain, Internet of Things & Big Data.

Blockchain no longer only has applications in the field of value exchange transaction management and emerges disruptively as a key tool with numerous applications for example in IoT. In effect, pioneer companies use blockchain for Trucking or tracking and traceability of the entire value chain in a logistics chain, for example.

The tracking of goods through the supply chain, with real-time location of their position, combined with other telemetry technologies to integrate the state or condition of various elements such as people, machines, vehicles, buildings, remote or not, in Finally, they are also transforming the IoT.

The retail already has examples where the customer just by entering the sales room is recognized along with their electronic wallet data, balance, available credits, which in combination with BigData will soon also allow to know if you need lubricating liquid for contact lenses or If after buying, predict that you are going to load benzine and where the pond, the last loads and the trips registered account for it.

That is the near future, today the customer travels through the sales room and his car is followed on the aisle map because each car is unique, has a geo-tracking chip and is also able to detect which products, which time and in which aisle "entered" the customer's car. In the meantime, the purchasing system will reduce the amounts from the client's purse, leaving it to leave the sales room with minimal human contact, and when arriving at the parking lot, the car goes down again, this time with the V ° B ° of the payment authorized, each product once in the trunk.

If we move to not-so-delusional scenarios, the car and the house and the streets will have / will be IoT and Trucking will be intense ... that's why the encryption developers are boosting promoting the defense of your privacy.

The governments of the world observe and gradually take sides. The US understood that they should not, and cannot, fight against digital currencies. After some discussions, bitcoins began to obtain some legal status; today the IRS in the US He has stated that bitcoin is a "property" while European authorities are seeing BTCs as a currency. Japan has gone further qualifying it as legal tender.

What course will the facts take, the lord of the world and his third ray have already decided.

Bibliography

Neuromant, William Gibson, 1984.

The End of the Nation-State, Keinichi Ohmae, 1995.

Out of Control - The new biology of machines, Kevin Kelly, 1994.