The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of a number of disruptive technologies. The advent of the internet has made the rise of social media possible, and billions of people, as well as thousands of corporations are now connected and interacting on a daily basis. The world has also been able to leverage unused assets in the sharing economy, which in many cases is powered by financial technology (fintech) arms, and this has also helped increase competitiveness in previously protected fields. Blockchain holds promise for being the latest disruptive technology, and we argue in this chapter that the technology may found applications in areas as varied as transaction processing, government cash management, commercial bank ledger administration and clearing and settlement of financial assets. We have already seen how blockchain technologies have enabled the creation of crypto-currencies, and their rise has been documented widely. The use of these currencies has prompted wide discussions on the merits (or lack thereof) of decentralization, disintermediation, anonymity and censor-ship resistance in this setting, aspects which we discuss in this chapter also. One cannot, however, dispute their potential to disrupt areas such as the global remittance industry, by facilitating near-instantaneous global remittance with very low transaction fees.
In more recent times, blockchain applications have appeared that go far beyond their first application domains in virtual currencies, for instance they are now important in fields such as domain registration, crowdfunding, prediction markets and even gambling. Second generation blockchain technologies enable not only the execution of simple transactions, but the carrying out of computation on a network, where e.g. payments become conditional on the state of some internal or external variables (much the same way as financial derivatives have a payout that is a function of an underlying financial instrument). This is the basis for `smart contract' technologies, which we shall see can be important building blocks for these new application areas. As a consequence of these second generation technologies, a number of developments in this field have begun to appear which include third party data ledgers (Devanbu et al. [2001]), e-contracts/smart contracts and virtual contracts (Buterin [2014b]; Kosba et al. [2015]; Swan [2015]), e-assets or remote asset title transfers (Halevi et al. [2011]) and further applications, discussed in Czepluch et al. [2015].
This is a practical Blockchain implementation written in JavaScript. If you wanna know more about Blockchain and it's Applications you can read my book here.
To install this application, you'll need Node.js 7+ (which comes with npm) installed on your computer. From your command line:
You'll need Git to run the project from source. From your command line:
# Clone this repository
$ git clone https://github.com/JBAhire/Blockchain-CLI
# Go into the repository
$ cd blockchain
# Install dependencies
$ npm install
# Run the app
$ npm start