When the banking system went into meltdown in 2008, an intriguing glimpse of an alternative future appeared. On 31 October, an unknown cryptographer who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto launched what he described as “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer to peer, with no trusted third party”. The name he assigned to this new currency was bitcoin.


........because the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin may turn out to be both transformational and benign in ways that we are just beginning to appreciate.

Why? Well, in essence a blockchain is really a way of using cryptography to certify that a particular token is the property of, or is inextricably connected to, a particular entity. In this particular case, the token is a bitcoin (or part thereof) and the entity is an individual (or an organisation). The blockchain is a dynamic (ie continuously updated) database of who owns (or is connected with) what.

In the real, physical world, we have lots of such databases – think of bank accounts or land registries – but they are records maintained by agencies and organisations, which means that they can be altered, corrupted or lost. So we have to trust the institutions that maintain them, which means trusting outfits like the banks that have just been fined £3.7bn for rigging foreign exchange markets. A blockchain, in contrast, is a public database that is continually maintained and updated by software running on thousands of computers all over the world. And since every change of ownership is publicly logged, the need to trust a (centralised) institution is replaced by the need to trust a highly decentralised network.

The most interesting case I’ve seen so far surfaced the other day when the state of Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, announced that it was going to use a blockchain to build a permanent and secure land title registry. This is significant because one of the problems that bedevil many – if not most – developing countries is the absence of reliable or uncorrupt land registries.

Wazua has been quite today. Only 2 active threads, and very few posts. Is this the work of the bear.

@mnadii, @ hisah. look at what u did to the people. ha ha.

When Safcom was trading around 17 bob, @Hisah talked of it going back to 12.50 bob (& likely to trade below that) which looked far fetched then. Now looks reality probably by mid next month if no intervetion comes soon!!!!