Libertés Numériques

Banks and other techies unite to build universal blockchain

Together with twenty other corporations, The Linux Foundation has announced a research effort to unify and further develop blockchain technology, the core of many of today's cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.

At the start of 2014, in a New York Times article, Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley's top investors, listed Bitcoin and its underlying technology, its blockchain, as one the top three inventions of all time, after personal computers in 1975, and the Internet in 1993.

The blockchain is nothing more than a public ledger of transactions, secured via cryptographic algorithms, shared amongst all computers participating in the ledger, and tamper-proof, even from a server's owner.

The technology was made famous by Bitcoin, but it's also agnostic enough to be used in other fields of activity as well. These include the financial sector, insurance, manufacturing, government, and so on.