Technology, Finance, Entrepreneurship
Blockstack is an open-source and developer-friendly network for building decentralized apps and smart contracts. Blockstack introduces a new mining mechanism, Proof-of-Transfer(PoX) which allows for a Proof of Work chain (in Blockstack’s case, Bitcoin) to be leveraged and extended. This opens up a wide range of opportunities for developers to build ontop of Bitcoin Network.
The release of the Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, gave rise to a new technology(Blockchain), and initiated a movement towards greater decentralization.
Bitcoin started off within a niche community of cryptographers and computer scientists, but gradually expanded across the globe to individuals from all walks of life. The beauty of decentralization is the inclusiveness that the community offers to everyone, where anyone who believes in the project is welcome to be part of it, through hodling(misspelling for hold) the token and/or contributing to the project in other ways.
What is DeFi?
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been in the spotlight in recent months, with several DeFi projects gaining traction and their tokens soaring in prices have attracted a lot more attention. But what exactly is decentralized finance and what can it do that traditional finance couldn’t?
DeFi represents an ecosystem of financial applications that are built ontop of blockchain networks. Financial applications ranging from borrowing/lending, to owning fractional assets through tokenization and peer-to-peer transactions.
Bitcoin protocol, the world’s most secured blockchain network and the highest profile cryptocurrency(bitcoin) is where most people first learnt about blockchain technology. I’m certainly one of them, having stumbled upon bitcoin in 2016 and went down the rabbit hold to learn more about the mechanism powering the Bitcoin protocol. Blockchain technology which powers the Bitcoin protocol stretches across multiple domains such as cryptography, computer science, economics, finance and more. What makes the Bitcon protocol the most secured blockchain network is the underlying Proof-of-Work(PoW) consensus algorithm, which have the most nodes(miners) running the network in the industry. Miners compete against each other(by solving mathematical puzzles through computing power) to complete transactions on the Bitcoin network and be rewarded with bitcoin. The complexity of the puzzle increases as 1) users on the network increases, 2) increase in computing power as more miners decides to run the network, 3) and the increase in network load. The hash of each block contains the hash of the previous block, which increases security and prevents any block violation, thus the term blockchain. A quick look at Bitcoin protocol’s 2 main security metrics 1) Total Hashrate and 2) Network Difficulty, shows that they are at an all time high.