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<span style="font-size: 20px; font-weight: bold;
color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: arial;
line-height: 110%;">OPLIN 4cast #370: Bitcoin
could be more than money</span><br>
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<span style="font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal;
color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-style: italic;
font-family: arial;">January 29th, 2014</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;font-size: 16px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;"><img
alt="Bitcoin logo"
src="cid:part4.01020005.05080206@oplin.org"
align="left" height="110" width="110">Last week,
Marc Andreessen, the well-known technology
investor and software developer, published an
opinion piece (linked below) in the <em>New York
Times</em> entitled "Why Bitcoin Matters." We
wrote about Bitcoin in a <em>4cast</em> <a
href="http://www.oplin.org/4cast/?p=1923">posting</a>
almost three years ago, and since there have been
a lot of stories about Bitcoin in the press
recently, this <em>4cast</em> is not intended to
explain what Bitcoin is. Rather, Mr. Andreessen
made an interesting point about the wider
implications of the way Bitcoin works, which
caught our attention, because it seems like it
might have practical application in libraries
struggling with lending digital materials not
covered by copyright doctrines or possibly other
library uses we haven't imagined.
</p>
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<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li style="text-align: justify; font-size: 16px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;"><a
href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/">Why
Bitcoin matters</a> (New York Times/Marc
Andreessen) "...Bitcoin gives us, for the first
time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a
unique piece of digital property to another
Internet user, such that the transfer is
guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows
that the transfer has taken place, and nobody
can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer.
The consequences of this breakthrough are hard
to overstate. What kinds of digital property
might be transferred in this way? Think about
digital signatures, digital contracts, digital
keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers),
digital ownership of physical assets such as
cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds ...
and digital money."</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; font-size: 16px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;"><a
href="https://medium.com/the-magazine/23e551c67a6">On
the matter of why Bitcoin matters</a> (The
Magazine on Medium/Glenn Fleishman) "I also
agree completely with Andreessen that Bitcoin
can be used for an enormous number of
non-currency related purposes in which
permanent, irreversible proofs of transactions
are required. Bitcoin's procedure of building a
chain, in which each link is cryptographically
related to the link before it, means that after
an hour or so, it should be impossible even with
a world superpower's efforts to reverse out a
transaction. Further, these transactions can be
proven to have been created by a party who
possesses a private key; no other party can
create such a proof."</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; font-size: 16px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;"><a
href="http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/01/21/bitcoin-platform/">Bitcoin
is not just digital currency. It's Napster for
finance.</a> (Fortune/David Z. Morris) "The
most speculative and long-range potential
functions of peer-to-peer finance and smart
contracts are forms of what's known as 'Smart
Property.' This idea was explored in a <a
href="http://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469">1997
paper</a> by computer scientist and former
George Washington University law professor Nick
Szabo (who has come under occasional suspicion
of being pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi
Nakamoto). In the paper, Szabo defines smart
contracts as agreements enforced not by law, but
by hardware or software that would 'fully embed
in property the contractual terms which deal
with it.' Szabo offers the humble vending
machine as an existing case."</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; font-size: 16px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;"><a
href="http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/19/bitcoin-more-than-money/print">Bitcoin:
More than money</a> (reason.com/Jerry Brito)
"Bitcoin's potential is not limited to
transactions. One non-transactional use of the
technology is as a decentralized notary service,
allowing anyone to verify that a particular
document existed at a certain point in time. Say
you've written a movie screenplay, and before
you shop it around Hollywood you want to record
that you had it first. To accomplish this, you
can add the document's cryptographic signature
to the blockchain, the Bitcoin public ledger. If
someone ever were to claim the screenplay as his
own, you could point to the blockchain to prove
you had it first. The website
ProofOfExistence.com is a first attempt at
creating this kind of service."</li>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div>
<p style="text-align: left; font-size: 20px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;"><small><strong><em>Blockchain
fact:</em></strong></small><br>
</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; font-size: 16px;
font-family: arial; line-height: 110%;">The last
article quoted above mentions a "blockchain,"
which works as a global, public ledger for
recording and validating all transactions in the
Bitcoin network. It's a complex protocol, but if
you're curious, Michael Nielsen has posted a
detailed but readable <a
href="http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/">explanation</a>,
or if you'd rather see the process diagrammed on a
blackboard, the Khan Academy has posted a <a
href="https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-transaction-block-chains">12-minute
video</a>.
</div>
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