Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

models, and potentially many more in the

future. The first consensus mechanism is

the mining operation: with the aid of

software, miners review, confirm, and

register transactions. The second

consensus mechanism is prediction

markets. An event might be assumed to

be true if enough independent

unaffiliated persons have voted their

opinion that it is true in a prediction

market. Truthcoin is such a blockchain-

based, trustless, peer-to-peer prediction

marketplace that hopes to resolve some

problems with traditional prediction

markets, such as bias in voters, and

integrate the prediction market concept

with the remunerative coin and public

records structure of Bitcoin.124 Even

farther, Truthcoin aims to provide a

trustless oracle service, registering what

might be relevant events of record in the

blockchain. Some examples of

“information items” of interest would be

the current interest rate, the daily high

temperature, and cryptocurrency daily

high and low prices and trading volume.

For blockchain-based smart contract

operations, independent oracles

providing information are a key

component in the value chain. For

example, blockchain-based mortgage

might have certain interest rate reset

dates in the future that could be

automatically implemented upon having

a trustable source of future information,

such as that registered in a blockchain by

a reputable independent oracle, like

Truthcoin.

Societal Maturity Impact of

Blockchain Governance

A side benefit of blockchain governance

is that it might force individuals and

societies to grow into a new level of

maturity in how topics like governance,

authority, independence, and

participation are conceptualized and

executed. We are not used to governance

being a personal responsibility and a

peer-to-peer system as opposed to

something externally imposed by a

distant centralized institution. We are not

used to many aspects of blockchain

technology, like having to back up our

money, but we learn appropriate

savviness and new behaviors and

conceptualizations when adopting new

technologies. We are not used to

decentralized political authority and

autonomy.

However, we have matured into the

reception of decentralized authority in

other contexts. Authority floating freely

has already happened in other industries

such as information, wherein the news

and publishing industry became

decentralized with blogging and the

restructuring of the media industry.

Entertainment is similar, with corporate

media properties existing alongside

YouTube channels, and individuals

uploading their own content to the Web.

The value chain has exploded into the

long-tail format, and individuals became

their own taste makers and quality

arbiters. A crucial twenty-first-century

skill is that individuals must examine

content and think for themselves about

its quality and validity. The Bitcoin

revolution is the same thing happening

now with currency, economics, finance,

and monetary policy. It might seem

harder to let go of centralized authority

in matters of government and economics

as opposed to culture and information,

but there is no reason that social maturity

could not develop similarly in this

context.

Chapter 4. Blockchain 3.0:

Efficiency and Coordination

Applications Beyond Currency,

Economics, and Markets

Blockchain Science: Gridcoin,

Foldingcoin

As blockchain technology could

revolutionize the operation of other

fields, innovators are starting to envision

how the concepts might apply to science.

So far, the main thread is related to peer-

to-peer distributed computing projects

for which individual volunteers provide

unused computing cycles to Internet-

based distributed computing projects.

Two notable projects are SETI@home

(the Search for Extraterrestrial

Intelligence, which uses contributed

computing cycles to help analyze radio

signals from space, searching for signs

of extraterrestrial intelligence), and

Folding@home (a Stanford University

project for which computing cycles are

used to simulate protein folding, for

computational drug design and other

molecular dynamics problems). Per

blockchain technology, remunerative

coin has been set up to reward

participants in both the SETI@home and

Folding@home projects. For

SETI@home, there is Gridcoin, which is

the remunerative coin available to all

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure

for Network Computing) projects, the

infrastructure upon which SETI@home

runs. For Folding@home, there is

FoldingCoin, a Counterparty token that

runs and is exchangeable to the more

liquid XCP cryptocurrency (and

therefore out to Bitcoin and fiat

currency) via the Counterparty wallet

(Counterwallet).

A more fundamental use of the

blockchain for science could be

addressing the wastefulness of the

mining network, which consumes

massive amounts of electricity. Instead

of being used to crunch arbitrary

numbers, perhaps the extensive

processing power could be applied to

the more practical task of solving

existing science problems. However, a

mining algorithm must meet very

specific conditions, like generating code

strings or hashes that are easily

verifiable in one direction but not in