The Infinite Machine

by Camila Russo

After briefly introducing how Bitcoin was created and its advantages over existing payment systems (irreversible transactions provide a high degree of security, lack of a centralized authority makes it invulnerable to censorship, public transactions allow for unprecedented business transparency, etc.), he asked, “Given all of these advantages, the natural question is: Is it possible to use the same functionality for other applications as well? The answer, it turns out, is yes,” he wrote. The distributed database, secured by cryptographic proof-of-work, “is good for more than just the single limited-supply currency originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.” The same technology can be used to maintain ownership of company shares, property, bank deposits, basically, anything that can be represented as a digital asset, and is a “rivalrous good,” meaning that only one person can own it at a time, Vitalik argued.