The development of Bitcoin is historically important because it solved a problem of computer science that had previously been widely thought to be impossible: it is a decentralized, trustworthy generic transaction store. This realization raises interesting questions about the political motivations of Satoshi Nakamoto in presenting their creation as a digital currency when they must have known that they had solved this far more important general problem. I credit the discovery of the more general applicability of the Bitcoin technique to Aaron Swartz in his essay Squaring the Triangle, in which he presents an application of the system to secure, decentralized, and human-readable name registration and lookup. (I believe that this essay may prove historically to be Swartz’s most significant work in computing.) The more general application of the block-chain technique is already happening on a limited scale: Bitcoin’s own block-chain can be used directly as a global information log to prove a document’s existence at a certain time, while Namecoin is an implementation of a similar technique described by Swartz to provide a replacement for DNS.

Block-chains and Bitcoin Tuesday, December 24, 2013 @ 11:49am