Blockchain Revolution

Problem to Be Solved: On the Internet, people haven’t been able to transact or do
business directly for the simple reason that money isn’t like other information goods
and intellectual property per se. You can send the same selfie to all your friends, but
you ought not give your friend a dollar that you’ve already given to someone else.
The money must leave your account and go into your friend’s. It can’t exist in both
places, let alone multiple places. And so there’s a risk of your spending a unit of
digital currency in two places and having one of them bounce like a bad check. That’s

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called the double-spend problem. That’s good for fraudsters who want to spend their
money twice. It’s bad for the recipient of the bounced amount and bad for your
reputation online. Traditionally, when making online payments, we solve the double-
spend problem by clearing every transaction through the central databases of one or
many third parties, such as a money transfer service (like Western Union), a
commercial bank (Citicorp), a government body (Commonwealth Bank of Australia),
a credit card company (Visa), or an online payment platform (PayPal). Settlement can
take days or even weeks in some parts of the world.