Topic: Blockchain 1/2/3/4 (for beginners)...What does it all mean??? (Read 102 times)

[reposting here for beginners] Hope this is useful for folks who's new to the forum. If there's qns pls feel free to comment and I will try to ans to the best of my ability. IF not there's always other members.

Blockchain 1.0 --> Currency.
The original development of distributed ledger technology, a.k.a. DLT resulted in the first cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, where decentralised records of financial transactions and arguably, store of values on the blockchain enabled peer-to-peer transfer of payments (or more broadly, assets). These developments sometimes brought with them tagline benefits such as fast,trustless and anonimity, which were viewed as a means of getting around centralised financial institutions like banks (yups, those blood-sucking buggers).

Blockchain 2.0 --> Smart Contracts.
Personally, I think these are the start of the true blockchain revolution. If you can code a gazillion if/else statements into the blockchain, and enable trustless execution of certain actions given certain conditions, you can basically automate or dis-intermediate away A LOT of the inefficiencies buried in our current financial, corporate, social and government administrative systems. Notably, the marriage of blockchain tech and Smart Contracts meant that it is almost technically impossible to hack the latter.

Blockchain 3.0 --> Decentralised Apps (Dapps for short).
The commonly touted benefits of Dapps include their avoidance of centralised infrastructure and hence any central point of failure. The code and its executive basically live on huge peer-to-peer blockchain networks (my mobile, Peter’s home desktop, that Russian guy’s mini-server etc.). Note that all these are behind the scenes, the frontend user platform can take any form and be designed for any purpose. For instance, the recent cryptokitty craze (hey, i’m a owner of digital cats too!) was one of the more (initially) popular Dapps that came along, despite it seemingly clogging up the ethereum network at some point.

Blockchain 4.0 --> self-sustaining blockchain ecosystems? inter-operable sidechains/ blockchains etc.
Personally I think while some projects tout themselves as pushing the blockchain 4.0 frontier, we've yet to truly see a inter-operable blockchain platform that works? Let me know if u feel otherwise.