(EDIT, 17/3/15 – and also tl;dr: our distributed does-what-YouTube-does-but-we-can’t-call-it-YouTube is done. Head over to the repo to play around.)
Everything you think you know about blockchains is dead wrong:
- Blockchains aren’t printing presses for money. They’re distributed authentication databases.
- Smart contracts have nothing to do with the law. They are, as Casey says, scripts – which allow for the cryptographically verifiable execution of code in respect of cryptographically verifiable data.
- They do distributed data management on certain terms without servers and with a minimum of administrative oversight.
Writing a blockchain application isn’t as easy as rolling a cryptocurrency (which takes ten minutes). Blockchain applications take a lot of work – a couple of months – to design.
Eris Industries’ stack makes this (relatively) easy to do. It will get easier with the passage of time.
Here’s the open beta release of our open-source, distributed, peer-to-peer streaming video application (EDIT: I can’t say YouTube, because that might infringe Google’s IP. But if I could say YouTube, I would) that utilises three distributed protocols – Thelonious, Bitcoin, and IPFS – to do its job.
RTFM to see what it does, how it does it, and how to install it.
It’s a tech demonstrator, not an end-product. But the message we want to send is this: this is where blockchain has been…
And this is where it’s going:
https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/568810168177315841
Our in-house little coder marmot army is currently wiring up the frontend and backend (both of which are done, but just need to be connected up). Expect all that to land early next week.
Enjoy your weekend. Happy hacking!
