ThinkTWENTY20

After years of collaborating with a group called Libra, that group more recently changed its name – and shortly afterward, it became clear why: a social media giant had bought the name to establish its own cryptocurrency, Libra.

And so back to the question. I have had the honor of working with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a national expert to ISO/TC 307 Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies. That group will establish the ISO standards for that space, including terminology. I also had the honor of working on a commercial effort with Stuart Haber. Stuart is referenced three times in the Bitcoin whitepaper of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the use of cryptographic means to add new blocks of data to an existing chain is his development, commercialized more than a decade before Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin whitepaper, which focused on peer-to-peer payments not requiring a central intermediary – “based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” But now many of my colleagues believe that if the cryptographically supported chain of blocks isn’t peer-to-peer/decentralized, it isn’t a blockchain. While Bitcoin introduced decentralization, consensus, incentive mechanisms and other goodies, Stuart’s solution provided public mechanisms for anyone to be able to check the integrity of documents on his chain of blocks.

 How about Libra? Is it a cryptocurrency? Do we use Bitcoin as the model – decentralization, permissionless? Or perhaps Beenz, the haz-beenz one time “currency of the Web”?

Does any of this influence your business, your investing, your financing?