Epistemic Implications of Networks Built With a Bitcoin Blockchain Design

Thoughts on why and how blockchain can change many networks

This is an exploration of properties and implications enabled by networks adopting blockchain technology, with the design principles of Bitcoin.

Human history is the history of networks. Nomad communities, agricultural towns, and full-blown civilizations, states, nations, and organizations encompassing several nations represent how humans have evolved in creating structures for massive organization. Humans are the networked species.

Networks allow us to cooperate when we would otherwise have to do things alone, or start from scratch. Humans have seized the world due to many reasons, but one is clearly being the ability to network — communicate and build knowledge upon knowledge — unlike any other species. Networks such as language, libraries, and the Internet have helped humans to compound knowledge. Networks such as governments and markets have helped humans to cooperate. But the incentives to build networks don’t only come from a top-down approach — humanity as an entity doesn’t think rationally.

Photo by NASA, taken from Unsplash. Other photos in article also from Unsplash.

The Economics of Violence

There are more reasons why humans keep reorganizing and inventing more complex structures to cooperate and rule. Maybe the incentives also come from a bottom-up approach. According to James Dale, and William Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, the logic of violence greatly influences the structure of society, which creates networks. The thinking comes from the fact that it’s easier to take than to create. Therefore, social structure emerges from the predator-prey relationship between makers and takers.

The economics of violence can be seen throughout the ages. In the Hunter-gatherer Age, there were no lands, and no possessions other than what could be carried. Rule by Tribes. In the Agricultural Age, land and possessions emerged, which became hard to defend. Feudal lords therefore ran a protection scheme, creating a hierarchical society. Rule by Kings. In the Industrial Age, armies with guns and vulnerable factories prompted consolidation of power. Rule by Nation-States. In the Nuclear Age, nuclear weapons created Mutually-Assured Destruction. Suddenly, large-scale war became very dangerous and thus globalized society has shifted toward large-scale peace and small-scale war. Rule by Superpowers. Currently, in the Information Age, guns have become much easier to create and distribute, and miniature drones are rendering battlefield systems obsolete and trivializing assassinations. The ease of offense and defense has increased. But there are also new systems that help decrease violence. Connected cameras means most violent actions can be filmed and broadcasted. The rise of mental labor over physical labor has reduced the returns of conquering people and territories.

From ourselves, to kings, priests, governments, elites, corporations, mobs, networks, and more, the protection of what we create or own has evolved throughout the ages. Now, imagine you didn’t have to worry about protecting your control of an asset or innovation — or that the protectors of these assets or innovations can’t abuse the power of control.

The underlying technology behind Bitcoin, the blockchain, may be one of the most influential inventions in all of human history — up there with language, money, organizations, and the internet. [1] The Internet is the World Wide Web of information, and the idea behind the blockchain is the World Wide Ledger of value. The Internet enabled the creation of hundreds of thousands of networks and thousands of existing networks have also leveraged the technology of the Internet. In a similar way, blockchain technology will give rise to new networks as well as influence many existing ones — it’s a new protocol on top of which to build networks. In this post I explore the epistemic implications of networks built with blockchain technology. When analyzed, there are mind-blowing epistemic implications of using blockchains to build networks. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, we first have to understand what “Blockchain” is.

What is Blockchain and Why is it Important?

In simple terms, a Blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record virtually everything of value. Information held on a blockchain exists as a shared — and continually reconciled — database. A blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location so the records it keeps are truly public and easily verifiable. No centralized version of this information exists for a hacker to corrupt. Hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, its data is accessible to anyone on the internet.

Blockchain is the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, which was invented by an anonymous person or group of people using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. The Bitcoin White Paper was published in October 2008 and the first version of Bitcoin was released in 2009. In the abstract of the paper, Satoshi writes:

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double- spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.

The Abstract continues with more technical descriptions of how the technology works, and the White Paper as a whole is technical yet accessible. However, there’s still jargon that may be cognitively distant to many people.

Imagine you own an apple 🍎. You can give this apple to your friend Isaac Newton and by simply looking at what you now have, Isaac, you, and anyone else can tell that you don’t own that apple anymore. Isaac owns it. Now imagine you own a digital apple and you send it to Isaac. How can Isaac, or anyone else, be sure that you don’t own that apple anymore? You could have easily made a copy of that digital apple and sent one of the copies to Isaac. Or you could have made 1,000 copies 🍎🍎🍎🍎. This is the Double Spending Problem that Satoshi is referring to. This problem is easily solved today with central authorities. The authorities keep track of the apples you own, and anyone can check in with the authorities to verify transactions. Trust is dependent on a trusted — or “trusted”? — 3rd party. There was no good way of solving the Double Spending Problem in a distributed fashion — which is actually a famous unsolved Computer Science problem called the Byzantine Generals Problem — without a trusted 3rd party. But in 2008, Satoshi rolled through with a practical solution — the Blockchain.

For the first time in the history of humanity, we can trust transactions without trust. No need to trust a 3rd party, we have cryptographic proof. The logic of violence is suddenly redesigned — we don’t need a middle-man anymore to protect us. No kings, priests, or central authorities are needed to trust exchanges with other people. Trust is fundamental to the way humans interact and blockchain is spearheading a trust revolution.

With regard to money, for the first time ever, anyone can send or receive any amount of money to or from anyone else, anywhere on the planet, conveniently and without restriction. Money is one of the oldest technologies humanity created. We could speculate that it could even precede writing. The very first samples of writing we have are tallies and ledgers of debts owed. So money could have easily had an oral tradition until writing was created to keep track of value. Humans could transact directly with physical currency but in the Information Age, there was no way to transact through the Internet without a trusted party.

Bitcoin, “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, as described by Satoshi Nakamoto, is the pioneering and biggest cryptocurrency — digital currency secured with cryptography. Now, however, there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Blockchains have the potential to expand far beyond the finance industry, and several entrepreneurs have already realized the potential of blockchain technology.

Maybe you’re a consumer who wants to know where the milk for your baby really comes from. In what is referred to as the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, an estimated 300,000 people were victims of milk adulterated with melamine. Or you’re an immigrant who’s sick of paying high fees to send money internationally to loved ones. Perhaps you’re an aid worker who needs to identify land titles of landowners so you can rebuild their homes after an earthquake. Or a citizen tired of the lack of transparency and accountability of politicians. Or a user of social media who values your privacy and thinks all the data you generate shouldn’t be owned by big corporations, but by you. Suddenly, Google’s motto of “don’t be evil” would be revamped to “can’t be evil”.

This has never happened before — trusted transactions directly between two or more parties, authenticated by mass collaboration and powered by collective self-interests, rather than by large corporations motivated by profit.

This is definitely not the solution for all structural problems in our society but blockchain technology promises to restructure how many networks operate. We’re in the dawn of the blockchain revolution so technology development is still early and there are many problems to solve such as scaling, efficiency, and impact on the environment. However, this new system that can serve as the underlying structure of many networks has very interesting properties and implications.

After extensive reading and thinking, I’ve identified the following structural properties and implications of networks influenced by blockchains. Blockchain-enabled networks serve as both the medium of change and creators of change — thus, their properties can also be seen as implications. In particular, I’m analyzing networks that would use blockchain technology with the same design principles that Bitcoin is using — i.e. they use blockchains and remain open, permissionless, decentralized, and use market incentives.

Epistemic Implications of Networks Using Blockchain Technology

Decentralization

Decentralization is such a buzzword nowadays, but in simple terms, decentralization is the distribution of power away from a central location or authority. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum — the leading blockchain-based distributed computing platform, explains that decentralization in terms of computer software can be thought of as having three axes [the following is a summary of Vitalik’s linked post]:

• Architectural (de)centralization
• Political (de)centralization
• Logical (de)centralization

In Architectural (de)centralization, we ask: how many physical computers compose a system, and how many of those computers can the system tolerate breaking down at any single time?

In Political (de)centralization, we ask: how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?

In Logical (de)centralization, we ask: do the data structures and interface that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or a swarm? If you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully operate as independent units?

As an arguable example, traditional corporations are architecturally centralized since there’s a single HeadQuarters, politically centralized since there’s one CEO, and logically centralized since you can’t really split a company in half.

On the other end of the spectrum, languages are architecturally decentralized since there is no centralized infrastructure required for a language to exist. They’re politically decentralized since the rules of a specific language aren’t created or controlled by any one single person. [2] And they’re logically decentralized since the language spoken between persons A and B do not need to agree with the language spoken between persons C and D.

Blockchains are architecturally decentralized since there is no infrastructural central point of failure. They’re politically decentralized since no one controls them. [3] But they are logically centralized since there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computer.

Now that we have a better understanding of what decentralization means, we can ask, why is it useful? How could a network — and what types of networks — benefit from decentralization? There are usually several arguments:

• Fault tolerance — decentralized systems are less likely to fail accidentally because they rely on many separate nodes and at any given time the chance of one node failing is lower than all nodes failing.
• Attack resistance — decentralized systems are more expensive to attack and destroy or manipulate because they lack sensitive central points that can be attacked at a much lower cost than the economic size of the surrounding system.
• Collusion resistance — it is much harder for participants in decentralized systems to collude to act in ways that benefit them at the expense of other participants, whereas the leaderships of corporations and governments collude in ways that benefit themselves but harm less well-coordinated citizens, customers, employees and the general public.

However, it is important to note that while all of these seem like advantages, and they are for certain networks, they might not make sense for all networks. We may be trading with other great properties of centralized systems. If our goal is to have more control of the processes, then centralization beats decentralization. Likewise, if our goal is to make decisions faster, centralization also beats decentralization.

Furthermore, there are always more nuisances to be aware of. And although this post is not only about decentralization, take fault tolerance as an example. While it is less likely for four jet engines to fail than one jet engine, what if all four engines were made in the same factory and a fault was introduced to all of them? This is called common mode failure. Therefore, it makes sense to decentralize the systems building the nodes — it makes sense to allow for multiple competing implementations of the blockchain network.

Evolution Through Forks and Experimentation

In computer programming, the concept of open source has enabled some of the most complex and important software projects, such as the Linux Operating System. Open source means that anyone can contribute to the code, or they can take any existing code and “fork it” — start building a new, separate version on top of someone else’s existing version.

Forking is epistemically analogous to evolving. By creating multiple competing versions of a piece of code, there are suddenly multiple experiments for what the system could be. It enables an experimenting ground for all sorts of governance and monetary policies.

Instead of trying out a single path, experimenting with multiple paths can generate very valuable systems. Using diversity and evolution is epistemically advantageous since these evolutionary mechanisms can adapt to what users believe is more useful. Ultimately, forking evolution works because anyone can create their own fork.

Open, Permissionless Networks

Open, permissionless networks enable infinite innovation. The Internet has evolved into what it is today because it is an open, permissionless network. Anyone can open their computer and post content on the internet, build new applications, and form their own communities.

Blockchain [used in the way Bitcoin is using it] makes it easy to create open, permissionless networks. There’s no central authority determining who can or can’t join, or which contributions or forks are worthy.

Allowing a network to be accessible to anyone means adoption can grow exponentially — there are no barriers to entry. But why would someone want to join a network anyway?

In the age of the Internet, Facebook and private companies beat the open model for social network (RSS) because they had more money and developers. Through Blockchain, each user can be incentivized not only by regular network effects, but also by monetary incentives. [4]

Replacing Networks With Markets

Blockchains have the power to replace networks with markets. Blockchains allow meritorious participants in an open network to govern without a ruler and without money as we know it today. Blockchains are merit-based since the meritorious are those whose work advance the network. As society gives you money for giving society what it wants, blockchains give you cryptocurrencies (“tokens” or “altcoins”, both count as cryptocurrencies) for giving the network what it wants. Blockchains pay in their own cryptocurrency, not the common money (e.g. USD) of financial markets. Blockchains pay in cryptocurrency but the cryptocurrency’s goal is simply to track the work done.

Different blockchains demand different work. The Bitcoin network pays in bitcoins for securing the transaction ledger. Ethereum pays ether for executing and verifying computation. Filecoin pays filecoin for digital storage space. Blockchains combine the openness of democracy and the Internet with the incentives and merits of markets. To a blockchain, merit can mean security, bandwidth, storage, content, or anything of value that can be represented digitally. Therefore, blockchains can bring the market model to places where it couldn’t go before. Blockchains’ open, incentive, and merit based system can replace networks previously run by corporations, elites, and mobs. Blockchain-enabled networks will become markets.

In 1994, Nick Szabo, a legal scholar and cryptographer, proposed the idea for ‘smart contracts’ — self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. [5] Blockchain networks can execute smart contracts for agreements such as a car loan. If the borrower misses a payment, the contract would not allow the use and operation of the car. Blockchains with smart contracts have the potential to automate hundreds of existing value-based interactions.

Festival of the Commons

Consider a grassland with cattle. In economic terms, the “tragedy of the commons” is a market scenario where a shared public good is overexploited because each user has an incentive to maximize their own use until the good is depleted. Thus, with our grassland, the tragedy of the commons would be the scenario where due to a lack of regulation, cattle would overgraze the pasture until it becomes a muddy field.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos, the author of The Internet of Money, calls the inverse market relation that Bitcoin enables the “festival of the commons”. [6] The more people there are in the network, the more valuable the network.

Venture Capitalists call this phenomenon “Network Effects”. There are many examples of networks that exhibit the festival of the commons effect. Wikipedia is more valuable when more people contribute to Wikipedia. Airbnb is more valuable when more people list their houses in Airbnb. Facebook is more valuable when more of your friends are on Facebook.

Blockchains take networks effects even further through their cryptocurrencies. Not only is membership and contribution to a blockchain network more valuable as the network grows, but the cryptocurrency of this network also increases in value. And unlike national currencies, which are generally restricted to use within a country’s borders, cryptocurrencies are global and can therefore be used and adopted by almost any user who is part of the networked global society, or they could be exchanged with other cryptocurrencies.

This extra incentive of blockchains — cryptocurrency — helps with the classic entrepreneur chicken and egg problem. Entrepreneurs usually have ideas that could benefit many people, but most of these ideas are networks that are only beneficial if there’s already many people in the network. You can’t have a network without users, but it’s hard to bring users into a network without other users — companies like Paypal went so far as to give away $10 dollars to anyone who signed up for their service in order to get over this problem.

With blockchains, the first adopters of a network can be incentivized with monetary value — since a blockchain network’s cryptocurrency starts cheap but its value increases as the network grows. As the blockchain network grows, new users gain less monetary value but gain more from the festival of the commons, or the “network effects” phenomenon coming from the network getting bigger. All these incentives align to help blockchain-enabled networks grow.

Blockchain Networks as Applications and as Mediums of Expression

Incentives also mean that people will choose which networks to help grow. Current currencies are imposed on us by our nation-states, so by geography, just as we don’t have a choice where we are born or who our family is. In this new paradigm, we have a choice of which cryptocurrency to use. Cryptocurrencies will vary depending on their blockchain network, so depending on their application. Furthermore, since anyone can create a cryptocurrency as a form of expression, there will be hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrencies. Most will be fads, some will be created to raise awareness and to support networks that address important issues, and others will simply be about shared interests. Care about environment? Support greencoin. Middle school kids could even show support to Nico, the popular kid at their school, through NicoCoin. Currency is a mode of language. Many people have an interest in Cats? This can get out of hand very quickly. [7]

Which ones have value? Just like information in internet age: by merit. Value comes not from who issued it, but from who uses it — how many people use it and what they use it for.

Personhood is no longer required

Nonetheless, blockchain cryptocurrencies don’t recognize people. Not only does this programmable money not recognize borders, but it also can’t tell the difference between whether the user is a person or a machine. A self-driving car could earn cryptocurrency — one could imagine a future where cars are not only self-driving, but self-sufficient. Under a blockchain-based ride-sharing network, self-driving cars would be able to drive people places, earning some Driving-Cryptocurrency that they can use to pay for electricity and repairments, essentially becoming fully autonomous entities. Throughout the history of money, ownership of currency required personhood, either as an individual or as an association of individuals in a corporation. There is no rule, no authority to say cryptocurrencies can’t be owned by machines too. Machines would be able to pay each other. This implication will form the basis of applications and networks we have never seen before.

Triple Entry Accounting — Distributed Ledger

Modern financial accounting is based on a double entry system. Described simply, double entry bookkeeping allows firms to maintain records that reflect what the firm owns and owes and also what the firm has earned and spent over any given period of time. However, companies are usually expected to share their records with outside stakeholders, such as investors, lenders and the state. This creates the problem of how outsiders could trust the company’s books. Therefore, this is currently solved through independent public auditors, whose role is to serve as a trusted 3rd party. But as described before, blockchain technology gets rid of the need for middlemen to verify trust. A Carnegie Mellon professor named Yuji Ijiri published an academic paper in 1989 proposing Triple-Entry Accounting [although apparently Ian Grigg’s 2005 paper on Triple Entry Accounting is actually more influential to Bitcoin as it is today]. He described triple entry accounting as an enhancement of the traditional double entry system in which all accounting entries involving outside parties are cryptographically sealed by a third entry. Adoption can thus enhance the credibility of the value statements of a network. Furthermore, triple-entry would empower networks such as small enterprises to create opportunities for growth by offering a very low cost way to prove economic activity to outside stakeholders, such as banks or angel investors.

The blockchain implements this concept in a practical way — transactions are sealed cryptographically in the blockchain. At their most fundamental level, ledgers map economic and social relationships. Ledgers can confirm relationships such as identity, status, and authority. The innovation is not simply for the accounting world. The title for a house could be tied as a token that’s part of a housing blockchain network. Or one can imagine that the controlling key for a car could be transferred from one owner to another, and a couple of seconds later that owner can open the door of the car and drive away, because that car, which is part of a new distributed ledger for cars, can validate the new ownership.

The blockchain is a distributed ledger that does not rely on a trusted central authority to maintain and validate the ledger.

Infrastructure Restructuring

People wanted faster horses. When cars were invented, people thought they were useless toys — they’re never going to replace horses! Paved roads or highways didn’t exist, streets had sharp turns, there were maybe one or two gasoline stations per town, and everyone else was using horses. Why would someone want a car in a world where the infrastructure is built for horses? Slowly, more gasoline stations started popping up. Roads were paved and horses could still use those. But gradually, people started using more and more cars. Suddenly, the infrastructure was restructured, allowing for new ideas such as highways to flourish.

Similarly, electricity took a long time to spread. There was no electric grid — no infrastructure — at the beginning so it was very hard to adopt. But eventually, a new infrastructure enabled widespread adoption. Once the new infrastructure was in place, it enabled many new applications — people suddenly started having toasters, blow dryers, and applications that were unthinkable before.

Blockchain as an innovation is recent, and currently the infrastructure in most industries like finance, government, and more isn’t made for blockchain. But as history suggests, restructuring infrastructures is an implication when revolutionary technologies are introduced to the world.

Censorship Resistance

Assuming the design recipe for Bitcoin, a blockchain built with the same design of having no authority will have censorship resistance. By its very design, Bitcoin is immune to the blocking of payments by third parties. Nothing can stop someone from sending Bitcoin to someone else. Nothing can stop someone from executing code on Ethereum. This a very powerful property of networks adopting blockchain technology in this way. Bitcoin is not better than Visa for everyone, but it is possible to say that Bitcoin is the only way to make a payment for some people. These people could be in countries where access to competently operated traditional services is limited but where internet is not. Or it could be people that don’t want their transactions censored. For these people, a censorship-resistant network may be the only type of network in which they would be able to — or want to — transact. Transactions in a blockchain-based network with no authority are yours and nobody else’s — no third party’s.

Susceptible Networks

Some users may want censorship resistance and while that is enough of a motivation for networks to be built with blockchain technology, we are also interested in analyzing what types of networks would benefit more in a blockchain-based system. Under what other conditions can a network benefit from blockchain technology?

Now that we have identified certain properties and implications of blockchain-based networks, we can use those as factors for helping determine whether a network is suitable to adopt this system.

Would the network benefit from decentralization? It depends on whether centralization is epistemically better for this network. Many early startups need to move fast and thus having a single or a couple of founders making decisions can steer the network towards a better outcome faster than a decentralized system could before it’s too late — in this case, political centralization can prove to be better. In terms of software applications, centralized applications usually offer better user experiences — people usually prefer Photoshop over GIMP, the open- source alternative. However, blockchain technology may enable a better way to build and operate decentralized networks that wasn’t possible before.

Would the network benefit from openness and freedom of innovation? Would the network benefit from the free trust enabled by a distributed ledger? Would the network benefit from market incentives? Different networks have different purposes so they will have different needs — it’s nonsensical to say that all networks would be better if they transformed into a blockchain-based network.

Nevertheless, there are many industries beyond finance — government, charity, music, content creation, and more — where entrepreneurs have realized that the blockchain network structure could be beneficial. For example, startup BenBen is hoping to combat property fraud in emerging markets using blockchain technology. The founders comment that “property fraud is a huge issue in Africa. When you ‘buy’ a property it can take up to two years to register, because it’s a paper-based system. In that time someone else can come forward and claim that they owned the property in the first place.” Consequently, getting a mortgage in Africa and other parts of the developing world can be tricky, with many banks unwilling to commit money in a market dogged by criminals. Blockchain applied to the property network — or lack of network — could be revolutionary for the 70 percent of people worldwide who still don’t have access to this important type of record keeping. And in emergencies, when people still need to make purchases but might have all traditional forms of identification or credit swept away, the blockchain strategy is a great solution. The United Nations World Food Program deployed blockchain to allow refugees in Jordan to pay for their food. “Through blockchain, we aim to cut payment costs, better protect beneficiary data, control financial risks, and respond more rapidly in the wake of emergencies,” said WFP’s director of innovation and change management, Robert Opp, in May 2017. The blockchain could overcome the socioeconomic barriers that keep so many out of formal systems of recordkeeping and finance.

Conclusion

Given how different these blockchain-transformed networks are from the networks we have been using for decades or centuries, will we see a widespread adoption of blockchain networks? Will they become a critical part of the economy and the world? Will they create thousands of new economies? It’s hard to predict because it depends in part on the technology’s evolution but far more on society’s reaction to it.

Many entrepreneurs are already building networks with blockchain technology. There are over a thousand cryptocurrencies using the design pattern of Bitcoin.

Decentralized, open, permissionless, trustless, and censorship-resistant networks are quickly evolving, creating new markets, and being used as new mediums of expression.

Some infrastructures will be restructured, as incentives — both monetary and from the festival of the commons effect — bring more people into blockchain-based market networks. History of human networks might stop being only the history of human networks, expanding to the history of human and machine networks.

There is a lot of hype and only when the tide goes away do you discover who’s been swimming naked. [8] Over the next decade, we are likely to see many new networks adopting a blockchain-based system to operate. There are many networks emerging already, and we cannot fully imagine what other networks will be created around this platform of trust.

Footnotes

[1] When I refer to blockchain, I also refer to the other innovations that allow the blockchain to work, such as Proof of Work, cryptography, distributed computer systems, and more. The blockchain system stands on the shoulders of giants.

[2] With the exception of the Esperanto language, which was invented by a single person named L. L. Zamenhof.

[3] In principle, the whole point of a decentralized blockchain network is that it’s not controlled by a central authority, but there could easily be someone or a company controlling a blockchain network.

[4] Monetary incentives is a big reason for why there’s so many fanatics of Bitcoin.

[5] It is rumored that Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, but Nick has denied this.

[6] Andreas is amongst the best people I’ve encountered (and acknowledged by the Bitcoin community) for nailing down the why of Bitcoin/blockchain. His Internet of Money books are great, and many of the concepts from this post come from there.

[7] In fact, Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency whose logo features a dog made internet meme, “doge”, is one of the earliest cryptocurrencies, and it’s still pretty popular. “Cryptokitties” is also a recent application on the Ethereum platform, also currently one of the most popular on the Ethereum system.

[8] A great Warren Buffet quote.

Works Cited

• Andreessen, M. (2014, January 21). Why Bitcoin Matters — The New York Times.
• Antonopoulos, Andreas M.. The Internet of Money Volume One. Merkle Bloom LLC, 2016. Audible Edition.
• Antonopoulos, Andreas M.. The Internet of Money Volume Two. Merkle Bloom LLC, 2017. Kindle Edition.
• Buterin, Vitalik. “The Meaning of Decentralization.” N.p., 6 Feb. 2017. Web.
• Dale Davidson, James, and William Rees-Mogg. “The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.” 1st ed. Touchstone, 1999. Print.
• Ijiri, Yuji. “Momentum accounting and triple-entry bookkeeping: exploring the dynamic structure of accounting measurements, Studies in Accounting Research”, Vol. 31., American Accounting Association, Sarasota, 1989.
• Nakamoto, Satoshi. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” (2008): n. pag.
• Popper, Nathaniel. “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money”. Harper, 2016. Audible Edition.
• Vigna, Paul, and Michael J. Casey. “The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order”. Bodley Head, 2015. Audible Edition.
• Countless podcasts, articles, interviews, YouToube Videos, Reddit threads, and Twitter. Especially thoughts from Naval Ravikant.