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Avast Blog_ViewPoints: How Bitcoin has sparked what may be a techno-industrial revolu
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Blockchain technology isn’t just about crypto cash; it could be the basis for giving individuals control of their digital personas

Some 20 years ago, the founders of Amazon and Google essentially set the course for how the internet would come to dominate the way we live.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google did more than anyone else to actualize digital commerce as we’re experiencing it today – including its dark underbelly of ever-rising threats to privacy and cybersecurity.

Today we may be standing on the brink of the next great upheaval. Blockchain technology in 2019 may prove to be what the internet was in 1999.

Blockchain, also referred to as distributed ledger technology, or DLT, is much more than just the mechanism behind Bitcoin and cryptocurrency speculation mania. DLT holds the potential to open new horizons of commerce and culture, based on a new paradigm of openness and sharing.

Some believe that this time around there won’t be a handful of tech empresarios grabbing a stranglehold on the richest digital goldmines. Instead, optimists argue, individuals will arise and grab direct control of minute aspects of their digital personas – and companies will be compelled to adapt their business models to a new ethos of sharing for a greater good.

At least that’s a Utopian scenario being widely championed by thought leaders like economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, whose talk, “The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy,” has garnered 3.5 million views on YouTube. And much of the blockchain innovation taking place today is being directed by software prodigies, like Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who value openness and independence above all else.

Public blockchains and private DLTs are in a nascent stage, as stated above, approximately where the internet was in the 1990s. This time around, however, many more complexities are in play – and consensus is forming that blockchain will take us somewhere altogether different from where the internet took us.

“With the Internet, a single company could take a strategic decision and then forge ahead, but that’s not so with DLT,” says Forrester analyst Martha Bennett, whose cautious view of blockchain we’ll hear later. “Blockchains are a team sport. There needs to be major shifts in approach and corporate culture, towards collaboration among competitors, before blockchain-based networks can become the norm.”

That said, here are a few important things everyone should understand about the gelling blockchain revolution.

How public blockchains work

A blockchain is nothing more than a distributed database that functions as a shared ledger between multiple parties. The ledger can be shared among folks with a singular interest, such as Bitcoin holders. Or it can be a ledger for just about any type of information shared between companies or between people and organizations. A live copy of the ledger is distributed to the computers of the participants, and advanced cryptography prevents past ledger entries from being altered.

There’s a big difference between public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum and private DLTs, like those leveraging the open-source Hyperledger framework backed by IBM, Intel, Cisco and dozens of other corporate giants. (More on private blockchains coming up.)

In public blockchains, anyone can participate. The ledger is 100% decentralized, and a completely transparent view of all ledger entries is always accessible to one and all. Public blockchains typically rely on a computational contest, called proof-of-work, to attract participants and to enable the blockchain to function without needing someone to act as the trusted middleman.

Bitcoin mining, for instance, is a contest to solve a difficult cryptographic puzzle in order to earn the right to add the next block of validated ledger entries to the historical chain of ledger blocks. The winning miner gets a token -- one Bitcoin. All of the other miners, by competing against one another, serve to validate the ledger, thus eliminating the need for a trusted middleman.
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