Blockchain articles

Joseph Muscat, the Prime Minister of Malta, believes that cryptocurrencies are the “inevitable future of money” and that blockchain technology can promote a sustainable future by fighting “regressive and reactionary politics”.

After Bitcoin launched, keen developers noticed that its underlying technology, the blockchain, could do more than just send digital tokens from one point to another on the internet.

Chinese tech giant Tencent Holding started rolling out a pilot blockchain payment system for popular direct chat app, WeChat. WeChat has its own mobile payment system – WeChat Pay – which was recently upgraded using the blockchain technology.

To understand the concept of Ethereum gas, you first need to look at the protocol as a virtual machine on top of a decentralized network. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a decentralized platform that stores data and executes program code as a centralized computer server would. Programs that run on top of Ethereum are […]

Integral to the blockchain concept is another concept that dates back to 1979: the Merkle tree, named after computer scientist Ralph Merkle. Central to how the Bitcoin blockchain works, and also to Merkle trees, is the concept of hashing.

In centralized systems, an administrator manages the database and decides what files to store and how to update them. The administrator can delegate this power to others. With decentralized public ledgers, or blockchains, however, no administrators exist. Independent nodes in peer-to-peer networks must come to a consensus on the status of the ledger. The question […]

The global economy has relied on permanent employment as the main source of labor since the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Silicon Valley is changing that through short-term contracting or freelancing platforms such as Uber, Lyft, Upwork and Airbnb. In October 2016, Forbes reported: Freelancers now make up 35% of U.S. workers and collectively […]

While some media like to focus on Bitcoin’s connection with dark markets, the technology could actually make legal markets more secure. For example, it could protect the art market from the world’s third most lucrative crime—art forgery.