Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

within any kind of existing political,

economic, or religious system. For

example, the Islamic Bank of Bitcoin is

investigating ways to conduct Sharia-

compliant banking with Bitcoin. 92 A key

point of Bitcoin neutrality is that the real

target market for whom Bitcoin could be

most useful is the “unbanked,”

individuals who do not have access to

traditional banking services for any

number of reasons, estimated at 53

percent of the worldwide population.93

Even in the United States, 7.7 percent of

households are forecast to be unbanked

or underbanked.94

Bitcoin neutrality means access for the

unbanked and underbanked, which

requires Bitcoin solutions that apply in

all low-tech environments, with features

like SMS payment, paper wallets, and

batched blockchain transactions. Having

neutrality-oriented, easy-to-use solutions

(the “Twitter of emerging market

Bitcoin”) for Bitcoin could trigger

extremely fast uptake in underbanked

markets, continuing the trend of 31

percent of Kenya’s GDP being spent

through mobile phones.95 There are

different SMS Bitcoin wallets and

delivery mechanisms (like 37Coins96

and Coinapult, and projects like

Kipochi97 that are integrated with commonly used emerging-markets

mobile finance platforms like M-Pesa. A

similar project is a mobile cryptowallet

app, Saldo.mx, which uses the Ripple

open source protocol for clearing, and

links people living in the United States

and Latin America for the remote

payment of bills, insurance, airtime,

credit, and products.

Digital Divide of Bitcoin

The term digital divide has typically

referred to the gap between those who

have access to certain technologies and

those who do not. In the case of

cryptocurrencies, if they are applied

with the principles of neutrality,

everyone worldwide might start to have

access. Thus, alternative currencies

could be a helpful tool for bridging the

digital divide. However, there is another

tier of digital divide beyond access:

know-how. A new digital divide could

arise (and arguably already has in some

sense) between those who know how to

operate securely on the Internet and

those who do not. The principles of

neutrality should be extended such that

appropriate mainstream tools make it

possible for anyone to operate

anonymously (or rather

pseudonymously), privately, and

securely in all of their web-based

interactions and transactions.

Digital Art: Blockchain

Attestation Services (Notary,

Intellectual Property

Protection)

Digital art is another arena in which

blockchain cryptography can provide a

paradigm-shifting improvement (it’s also

a good opportunity to discuss hashing

and timestamping, important concepts

for the rest of the book). The term

digital art refers to intellectual

property (IP) very generally, not just

online artworks. Art is connoted in the

patenting sense, meaning “owned IP.” As

we’ve discussed, in the context of digital

asset proof and protection, identity can

be seen as just one application, although

one that might require more extensive

specialty features. Whereas digital

identity relies on users having a Bitcoin

wallet address, digital asset proof in the

context of attestation services relies on

the blockchain functionality of hashing

and timestamping. Attestation services

(declaring something to be true, such as

asset ownership) are referred to as

digital art. The main use of the term

digital art in the blockchain industry is

to refer to using the blockchain to

register any form of IP (entirely digital

or representing something in the physical

world) or conduct attestation services

more generally, such as contract

notarization. The term is also used in the

blockchain industry to mean online

graphics, images photographs, or

digitally created artworks that are digital

assets, and thus IP to protect.

Hashing Plus Timestamping

For attestation services, blockchain

technology brings together two key

functions: hashing and secure

timestamping. Hashing is running a

computing algorithm over any content

file (a document, a genome file, a GIF

file, a video, etc.), the result of which is

a compressed string of alphanumeric

characters that cannot be back-computed

into the original content. For example,

every human genome file could be turned

into a 64-character hash string as a

unique and private identifier for that

content. 98 The hash represents the exact

content of original file. Anytime the

content needs to be reconfirmed, the

same hash algorithm is run over the file,

and the hash signature will be the same

if the file has not changed. The hash is

short enough to be included as text in a

blockchain transaction, which thus

provides the secure timestamping

function of when a specific attestation

transaction occurred. Via the hash, the

original file content has essentially been

encoded into the blockchain. The

blockchain can serve as a document

registry.

The key idea is using cryptographic

hashes as a form of asset verification

and attestation, the importance of which

could be extremely significant.

Blockchain hash functionality could be a

key function for the operation of the