The Brilliance of Satoshi
What does the blockchain really mean? That's a very subjective question to ask. Which blockchain in particular? There are more than a few of them now, and I'll admit my own consciousness has been expanded significantly after observing some of the more interesting ones. For the purposes of the next few minutes, I'm thinking about the concept of the Blockchain itself.
The ways this artistic mathematical expression of the Human Mind known as the blockchain has enabled us to interact with one another is a technology I can see evolving alongside Humanity in a way similar to writing. It will be used as needed to solve the problems of those who know how to manipulate it's qualities to suit their needs. The embarrassing gap between the so called 1st and 3rd worlds types of problems once we've really understood how to use it.
Satoshi himself attempted to create a better type of Money. The abstract of his white paper makes it very clear this was his intention. By open sourcing his work he offered us all this ability, after all, what good is money if nobody else wants it or has any to exchange with? The inevitable outcome of this is the restructuring of society into more natural groups who share similar cultural values and spiritual beliefs. It may be a matter of decades or centuries before this outcome is realized, we humans are far from perfect after all, but it will come. Whenever we stop throwing a tantrum and become more efficient as nations and peoples it will become much less chaotic in it's restructuring too.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf is the OG blockchain idea that I've been made aware of.
https://maidsafe.net/ is the next most interesting project I know of. The next version of the internet is coming and it will be pretty awesome.
https://golem.network/ is the next most interesting in my own personal opinion.
Like everything we humans are involved in, there are no assurances these projects will survive for any length of time or be considered a success. What they are trying to do is just the tip of the iceberg though. The imagination and creativity these projects will spark, that we all will be participating in for the remainder of our lives is the real legacy here.
So that's what the blockchain means to me. What about anyone else? Have any of these new implementations of Satoshi's Blockchain concept given you a glimpse into the future that left you breathless?
For me, the concept of decentralised trust is the real advancement seen. Decentralised can be achieved in various ways. Bitcoin started sthis with a Proof of Work approach. Meanwhile, there are a lot of other crrypto projects that tackle the concept of decentralised trust in another manner. Sometimes by only changing some parameters to the protocol (this was especially happening in the massive creation of new coins in the 2013 period) and sometimes by a whole new concensus model (currently seen a lot; for example Byteball and IOTA).
The competiton between these ideas and constant will in my opinion eventuallt lead to the 'perfect' blockchain concensus model or models. But that process takes time and will be messy.
Anyway, never a dull moment in cryptocurrency world.