Blockchain is much bigger than bitcoin. There is staggering innovation in the area of distributed ledgers, but most of it will be under the radar for anyone who hasn’t immersed themselves in that world. Here are five technologies and trends to watch. Smart contracts Bitcoin decentralises money, removing the requirement for a middleman and enabling trustless peer-to-peer transactions. Now, imagine you could do the same for computer code. The result would be a programme that executed instructions when certain conditions were met, and no one could stop it because it ran on a virtual computer distributed on thousands of different machines across the planet. Smart contracts do just that. Ethereum is the most famous smart contracts platform, though that reputation tipped over into infamy when its flagship application went rogue. Smart contracts do exactly what you tell them to; they operate under a ‘code is law’ model. The DAO – a virtual ‘company’ that managed well over a hundred million dollars worth of Ethereum based on the collective decisions of it holders – was exploited, and tens of millions of dollars drained from it. It caused an existential crisis for Ethereum, whose community had to decide whether to rewrite the supposedly immutable blockchain to reverse the damage. (In the end, they did – a decision which was hugely controversial and that has had far-reaching ramifications.) Amongst other issues, it raised the question of how smart ‘smart’ contracts really are. There are also questions about the scalability and energy cost of creating a planet-sized computer to run relatively simple programmes, though other platforms, like Lisk , take a different and more efficient approach. Bottom line: smart contracts are a powerful idea and we’ll be seeing a lot more of them. Blockchain-as-a-Service Creating and maintaining your own blockchain is a pain. […]
