So if it’s not defined in the Bitcoin paper, what does “blockchain” actually mean? I’ve asked a lot of people this question, ranging from renowned cryptographers and distributed systems experts to Bitcoin enthusiasts to people not particularly versed in either Bitcoin, distributed systems, or cryptography. No two people have ever given me the same…

Just in time for your Christmas break, a hand-picked selection of posts designed to give you something to think about as the year turns.

SEVERAL MAJOR COMPANIES from technology and financial ... IBM, Intel, Cisco, London Stock Exchange Group ... JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and State Street—have joined forces to create an alternative to the blockchain. Overseen by the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, this open source project aims to build blockchain-like technology ...for the business…

this couple will seal their union not before a priest or a judge, but on the almighty blockchain, a distributed global computing and data storage technology. BitNation... has established itself as the first virtual nation... has been building a set of tools and services that together may one day allow people to replace their national identity w…

FarmShare is a decentralized platform for community-supported agriculture (CSA) organizations, using the blockchain to tokenize shares and enable community governance... enable communities to buy, sell and trade cryptographic tokens that can be exchanged for weekly deliveries of locally produced organic food... an evolution of the CSA model ...…

the competitive significance of business models turbocharged by machine learning is poised to surge... companies must have two types of people to unleash the potential of machine learning. "Quants" are schooled in its language and methods. "Translators" can bridge the disciplines of data, machine learning, and decision making by reframing the …

"in a world dominated by self-steering taxis, each ride becomes cheaper if the vehicles are autonomous rather than owned and run by major corporations... We can program it to ... make it the most moral, socially minded capitalist possible...it would not be self-aware... But they would be programmed to seek self-improvement in order to avoid bec…

"UBS ... are the latest of a string of banks to take a shot at incubating for the blockchain.... Despite the title this article's mainly about bitcoin, although it ends with "The possibilities and potential for blockchain technology are extraordinary at every level of business and society. If you’re not keeping up then you should" - It's not a…

“Bitcoin offers the prospect of necessary and important disruption in finance for the benefit of buyers and sellers rather than financiers and middlemen.” - U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers "... bitcoin’s potential lies more as a low-profile, back-office phenomenon than as mainstream medium of exchange" - Interest in Bitcoin Grows on …

"the distributed Internet was dropped into an economy that has concentrated power structures with asymmetrical ability to shape it for their own purposes. Whether the old financial services behemoths, the new titans of silicon valley, or the vast government bureaucracies that mine the digital world to monitor their citizens, the dream of a new age…

Even if you're not in the slightest bit interested in bitcoin or blockchains, you should read this, as it first explains why the Internet enabled innovation through "the abstraction of a separate “application layer.” Core Internet protocols - the “transport layer” - shuffle packets of data around, but they don’t define how the exchange of packets …

"banks and bank regulators don't seem to be aware of how much danger they're in, or how fast tech is moving to destroy traditional financial services" - TransferWise, Mark Carney, And 'Uber-Type Situation' In Banking - Business Insider

"Get ready for companies that run themselves. But will the autonomous economy set us all free, or just make the rich richer?" Good intro, setting companies like etherum into a wider context and using a hypothetical example to show how a DAO could emerge and propagate. And then it sets alarm bells ringing. "the true economic significance of autom…

"At the moment, it seems to be fashionable for venture capitalists and tech journalists to say “I love the blockchain, just not bitcoin.” There are a few things that people that make this claim completely ignore: The blockchain does not work without bitcoin" - The Blockchain is Important and so is Bitcoin — Medium

"ADEPT ... Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry ... taps blockchains to provide the backbone of the system... IBM and Samsung chose three protocols – BitTorrent (file sharing), Ethereum (smart contracts) and TeleHash (peer-to-peer messaging) – to underpin ADEPT... blockchains deployed within the ADEPT system would serve as a ledger of…

" “[Currency] is not the killer app, it’s just the first app.”... “The potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for litigation and courts ... smart contracts ... in principle removes the potential for parties to have a dispute..."

"My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising. It will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. As we know, one person’s friction is another person’s revenue." Good tour of similarities and differences between today's early-Bitcoun a…

"the blockchain is all about replacing the servers that power today’s online world with computing power and storage that we all share.... Every network requires ... a “single source of truth” — the authority that says, “this is real,”... we have depended on servers run by corporations and governments... The blockchain turns the entire network in…

"If you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer­app or business, you will find this book essential reading." Based on the ToC, covers blockchains and the rest. Readable online for free.

"So for the uninitiated who have not yet grasped what Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, you ought to catch up. This is not something that should be ignored and there is a vast array of resources that explain the concept. In this post I’ll try to make sense of the Block Chain Protocol and the emerging ecosystem that is growing on it." - Bloc…

"Blockstream is working on technology ... to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock.... building on top of it using what are known as “sidechains.”... Blockstream has developed a way to safely move bitcoins back and forth between the blockchain and sidechains in order to add new functionality to Bitcoin transactions…

"a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself. ... a computer program that can be run on hardware which automatically executes those conditions." Good intro to what can - and can't - happen once you have bitcoins. - DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law – Bitcoin Magazine

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.

Does what it says on the box.

"The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency. What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society..…

"even if we still need human beings to perform certain specialized tasks, can we remove the management from the equation instead?... ... encode the mission statement into code... an inviolable contract that generates revenue, pays people to perform some function, and finds hardware for itself to run on, all without any need for top-down human di…

"We made the transition from dark web to daylight, venture capitalists started their stampede into digital currency businesses, governments worldwide gave the industry’s start-ups tacit approval, A+ executives joined the fray to build more of Bitcoin’s core infrastructure, we collectively answered some of the critics’ most pressing questions ... a…

"Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.... Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of …

"The diagram below is an early concept illustration of the Independent Digital Music Market which now forms the basis of the Bittunes platform & Android application currently in Open Beta in the Bittunes Google+ community. This project, which had been put on ice in late 2006, was restarted in April 2013 when Bitcoin began to ‘cross the chasm’,"

"From Bitcoin Blockchain technologies to advances in mesh networks connecting devices together to create new people powered communication systems... to new understandings of 'emergent semantics' processes at work in folksonomies and massive user generated data sets powering new forms of search and discovery systems... 'Edge Pri…