Topic: [2015-06-14] Sidechains And Lightning, The New New Bitcoin (Read 344 times)
The great thing about Bitcoin, for a tech columnist like me, is that it’s simultaneously over-the-top cinematic and technically dense. Richard Branson recently hosted a “Blockchain Summit” at his private Caribbean island. There’s a Bitcoin Jet. At the same time, 2015 has seen the release of a whole slew of technically gnarly–and technically fascinating–proposals built atop the Bitcoin blockchain.
In case you’ve been living in a Faraday cage: a blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer ledger system, (generally) safeguarded by cryptographic proof-of-work, initially devised by a mysterious entity called Satoshi Nakamoto … who released Bitcoin, the world’s first blockchain network/protocol/application/currency, in 2009.
To most people, Bitcoin itself is already deeply esoteric (and many still find it risible.) But to cryptocurrency aficionados, tired old garden-variety Bitcoin is so five minutes ago. Explaining today’s new cryptocurrency hotness to a general audience is an interesting challenge–I have an engineering degree from a top-tier school and I write software for a living, and I still find much of this material pretty impenetrable on first acquaintance–but here goes:
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/13/down-the-blockchain-rabbit-hole/
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