We're often being told that the blockchain – the tech behind Bitcoin – will rewire not just the banking sector, but social security payments, healthcare and even digital voting.Until now, it's all been theoretical tech industry talk.However, in recent months there's been a flurry of interest from the wider world, and some big developments that look set to shape a future blockchain economy.It emerged recently that China will use blockchain for making social security payments, while Australia has proposed using blockchain to run its voting systems.Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has publicly backed using blockchain for public services.Is blockchain – and its associated technologies and platforms, including Bitcoin and Ethereum – about to blossom from being an obscure niche technology to become the basis of a new kind of global public infrastructure?As a way to store and share data with high integrity – where data is protected from malicious attacks and where every change is recorded and audited – blockchain could help make the world's data safer.

But as with any sector of emerging tech, there are competing standards, incompatible systems and a constant stream of new innovations and platforms."Blockchaincan be thought of simply as a shared ledger, with the technology behind the scenes ensuring that it is secure, up-to-date, and tamperproof," says Jaco Cebula, Chief Technology Officer at investment services company Multrees."Access to this ledger can either be public or private depending on the application."Blockchainis all about trust, or rather, 'trustlessness', through clever cryptography.Malicious attempts to view or change the data become part of the data itself, making third-party hacks immediately obvious."Ablockchain is the database equivalent of writing in indelible ink, rather than in changeable pencil.If you try to change it after you've written it, people are going to notice afterwards," says Dave Hrycyszyn, director of strategy and technology at digital agency Head.You don't need to trust other people, you can trust the system.

Online trust becomes a commodity.Don't confuse these terms with actual products.Blockchain – also known as distributed ledger – is a technology, not a product.It's most famously been used to create cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) and to make smart contracts (Ethereum), and many more uses will follow, each with a new name."Thetechnologies that underpin blockchain – distributed data and cryptography – have been available for a long time," says Cebula."It is the linking of them together into a single technology that provides the benefits … there are no similar offerings."WhileBitcoin is infamous, Ethereum has a far lower profile.But it could help the blockchain have a far greater impact.A decentralised platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference, Ethereum extends blockchain beyond cryptocurrency.It's currently being talked-up as a possible successor to Bitcoin."LikeBitcoin, Ethereum can act as a currency, this time called 'ether'," explains Hrycyszyn, but Ethereum's blockchain goes much further by adding the capability to write smart contracts into the blockchain that are automatically executed when specific conditions are met."You

could have a bet saying 'watch the BBC news feed and transfer two units of ether to my friend Ramsey if Donald Trump becomes President of the United States'," says Hrycyszyn.bitcoin uprising"The contract would be executed automatically by the Ethereum system, if the conditions specified in the contract are met … proponents of smart contracts think that they could be the basis of entirely new economic models in the future."bitcoin qr code iphoneCraig Wright, a compulsive degree collector from Australia, has officially laid claim to the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the mysterious inventor of bitcoin.ethereum assassinHis motives are unclear, but the technical proof he has presented and the willingness of Gavin Andresen, Nakamoto's successor as the head developer of bitcoin, to accept him as genuine, are convincing.If Wright is Satoshi, extreme libertarians weren't just early adopters of the cryptocurrency -- one of them was its creator, and the idea came about for ideological reasons.bitcoin italia legale

Though Nakamoto's bitcoin manifesto studiously avoided political and philosophical statements, Wright doesn't.bitcoin mining with ciscoFive months after two tech publications, Wired and Gizmodo, first claimed that Wright was Nakamoto based on some leaked e-mails, he contacted three news organizations -- the BBC, the Economist and GQ -- to say he was ready to present proof that he had founded the cryptocurrency.ethereum downloading chain structureWright proved that he held the private cryptographic key used to sign the first bitcoin transfer -- from Nakamoto to Hal Finney.The BBC accepted his proof.GQ promised to publish its interview with Wright in its next issue.The Economist made the most serious attempt to verify Wright's claim, inviting Andresen and Jan Matonis, the former director of the Bitcoin Foundation, to witness Wright's demonstration and spelling out the technical aspects of the "paternity test" that would be necessary to establish Nakamoto's identity beyond any doubt.

Matonis and Andresen both agreed that Wright had shown that he had the key to the first bitcoin transfer, which, presumably, only Nakamoto could hold because he was the only person to "mine" bitcoin.That's not quite 100 percent proof -- who knows how Wright might have come by the key?Wright refused to provide any further evidence or, as he put it to the Economist, jump through any more hoops.Andresen, nevertheless, came away convinced that he had seen "the brilliant, opinionated, focused, generous -- and privacy-seeking -- person" he remembers from bitcoin's inception.The Economist qualified its acceptance of Wright's evidence: "As far as we can tell he indeed seems to be in possession of the keys, at least for block 9" -- the account from which the transfer to Finney was made.The social networks and other publications to which Wright didn't hand the scoop still express doubt, however.All they have seen is a post on Wright's blog in which he explains how a bitcoin key can be verified.

Reddit users took it for Wright's proof itself, and generated a number of threads to discuss Wright's self-outing as a scam.That skepticism seeped into the mainstream media.To me, it is misplaced.The goal of the post was to describe the key verification procedure using a publicly available example.It doesn't contain, or profess to contain, the keys that Wright demonstrated to the three publications, and to Matonis and Andresen.Doubt persists for two reasons:The bitcoin community recently splintered.Some of the developers, including Andresen, would like to double the size of the blocks, or transaction records entered into the blockchain, the public register that is the most valuable part of the bitcoin technology.That would make it possible to register more transactions per second.Others are against the increase.There are suspicions that Andersen could have a hidden agenda in confirming Nakamoto's identity.In addition, Wright doesn't appear to measure up to the demigod persona that Nakamoto has taken on for bitcoin enthusiasts and geeks in general.

Apparently, he can't supply proof that he has received the many degrees in engineering, law, finance and theology that he's claimed.He makes typos and grammatical errors in his blog posts (Nakamoto's bitcoin manifesto was meticulously copy-edited).He is temperamental and sometimes incoherent.The Australian authorities are investigating him for tax evasion.As Andresen wrote,"We love to create heroes -- but also seem to love hating them if they don’t live up to some unattainable ideal.It would be better if Satoshi Nakamoto was the codename for an NSA project, or an artificial intelligence sent from the future to advance our primitive money.He is not, he is an imperfect human being just like the rest of us."Yet,for all his imperfections, Wright is ideologically pure.And to me, that provides a missing piece of the puzzle.Nakamoto's manifesto gave no explanation for the creation of bitcoin, except as a nifty engineering exercise that would remove some of the limitations of conventional finance.

Wright's pronouncements show him to be an anarcho-capitalist of strong convictions.He has railed against governments and "hacktivists."He has stated that "there is more than enough help for ppl available.They just need to get off their butts and work."He has expressed an extreme belief in the free market without intervention, arguing that the 17th-century tulip bubble was the result of meddling with market forces.According to The Economist, he says he chose the pseudonym Nakamoto to honor a pro-free-trade 17th century philosopher and merchant.In his blog post on key verification, Wright quoted Jean-Paul Sartre's explanation for refusing the Nobel Prize: "If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner."Sartre explained that the title would subject his readers to undesirable pressure.The analogy is clear: Wright as Nakamoto is not the same as just Wright.I'm not sure it works that way: Enthusiasts' doubts show that they can't quite match the personality to the achievement.