Tomorrow’s Apps Will Come From Brilliant (And Risky) Bitcoin Code

Post date: Mar 22, 2014 1:24:38 AM

While they enable a whole new set of possibilities, blockchain-based applications also present legal, technical, and social challenges similar to those raised by other P2Papplications that came before them, such as BitTorrent, Tor, or Freenet. But some of

But some of these challenges haven’t been seen before in the context of traditional P2P networks.

The Bitcoin Protocol Is More ‘Cloud’ Than ‘P2P’

Although all blockchain-based applications are based on a decentralized network architecture, most of these applications distinguish themselves from standard P2P applications in at least two ways:

Users’ data (including personal data) are not stored locally into users’ devices.They subsist “in the cloud”, in the sense that they are hosted in a distributed database — the blockchain in this case — that is shared amongst all users in the network. This means that data is ubiquitous: It can be accessed at anytime and from anywhere, regardless of the user’s device. But the data is also more transparent: All actions or transactions performed by users are recorded on the blockchain and thus publicly available to everyone (although the identity of users can be kept secret and the content of such transactions can of course be encrypted).

Instead of being run locally, blockchain-based applications operate globally. They are deployed on the blockchain itself and are run — in a distributed manner — by relying on the resources provided by all users connected to the network. Although each client runs locally on the user’s device, these applications are constantly available, even when individual devices are turned off (as long as there are enough resources dedicated to them).

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