Web Monetization

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Early modern scholars referred most often to merchants as exemplars for theirhabit of keeping two notebooks: a daybook (or journal) to record transactionsin the order in which they occurred and a ledger in which these transactionswere sorted into categories, as in double- entry bookkeeping

Okay, so what’s the blockchain? It’s a database. Unlike most databases, it’s not controlled by one entity and it’s not easily rewritten. Instead, it’s a ledger, a permanent, examinable, public database. One can use it to record transactions of various sorts. It would be a really good way to keep track of property records, for example. Instead, we have title insurance, unsearchable folders of deeds in City Hall and often dusty tax records.

Francesco Sacchini recommends two notebooks inDeratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus(Wu ̈rzburg, 1614), chap. 13, p. 91: “Not unlike attentivemerchants . . . [who] keep two books, one small, the other large: the first you would calladversariaor a daybook(ephemerides),the second an account book(calendarium)and ledger(codex).”

Blockchains make piracy more of a headache.

A distributed ledger is a database existing in many places with many people using it. Not all distributed ledgers have the encryption and verification standards of a blockchain. A blockchain is a specific type of distributed ledger,

Fifth, is the idea of the ledger of things. We're already seeing applications of this new Internet of devices and things. Soon though, most transactions will happen between devices and not between people. Consider the smart home, homeowners are adding smart devices such as thermostats and solar panels. Soon potentially, trillions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Doing everything from driving us around to keeping our house lit to managing our affairs and managing our health information. These devices need to be resistant to hacking. They need to be able to communicate value such as money or assets like electricity, peer-to-peer. Consider electricity, if you imagine that your neighbor's home is generating energy from a solar panel and you've got a device that needs to buy that electricity, then those two devices need away to be able to contract, bargain, and execute a payment peer-to-peer. It's not going to happen through the Visa network. It can only happen on the blockchain.