Yet the real revolution lies beneath bitcoin: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed, mutable, permissible, and transparent digital ledger. We’ll take them one at a time. Distributed means it’s a shared, collected database, so everyone on the network—that is, anyone who owns the currency—has a copy of the ledger. Mutable means that anytime anyone enters new information in the ledger, all ledgers change. It’s permissible in the same way that cash is permissible—anyone can use it. Finally, the system is transparent because everyone on the network can see every transaction on the
...more
