Blockchain Revolution

Ripple’s architecture—relying on a handful of trusted nodes rather than on miners to secure the blockchain—gives it the ability to process more transactions but also makes it more centralized, which, in the eyes of some critics, makes it more vulnerable to attack and capricious and arbitrary behavior. Still, Ripple has been very successful in courting large banks and other potential enterprise users to employ their products and services and, to a lesser extent, use the native token of the network, called XRP.

controlled by the revenue in the network and the number of discount tokens held in their wallet. This means that discount tokens have an intrinsic value that increases as more customers use the network, says Scott Nelson of Sweetbridge. “Discount tokens change the business from driven by shareholder value to [driven by] customer value, making the customer the center of the focus of a business.”1

Utility tokens are usually not stand-alone blockchains. Rather, they run on top of platforms like Ethereum, ICON, and EOS.

Sweetbridge, which originated the concept of a “discount token,” where users receive a monthly discount on goods and services as long as they hold the token in a Sweetbridge wallet.

Blockchain can help us solve the prosperity paradox, where developed economies grow but the middle class and prosperity for most stagnates.

Soon most transactions will occur between things, not people. We can instill intelligence into our infrastructure by adding smart devices—sensors, cameras, microphones, global positioning chips, gyroscopes—that reconfigure themselves according to availability of bandwidth, storage, or other capacity, and therefore resist interruption.

importance of identity and the end of digital feudalism

several important new works have entered the market such as Michael Casey and Paul Vigna’s The Truth Machine, Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar’s Cryptoassets, and Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright’s Blockchain and the Law, to name a few.

Information about identity needs to be scarce, permanent, and unchangeable. So we go through powerful intermediaries to establish trust and maintain integrity.

Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin