Blockchain

The term blockchain is rapidly emerging, developing, morphing and expanding in context as is this Wikiversity learning resource. We have posted this collection of thoughts and initiated a discussion hoping to find out how the academic treatment and understanding of cryptocurrency and distributed computing may remain open, free, liberated and independent in generic form into the future. Blockchain is an emerging technology, and relates to future studies in that regard.

A blockchain can be considered a decentralized architecture with built-in security to increase the trust and integrity of transactions.

Everyone can check the transaction and verify it, and can also participate the process of getting consensus. Like Bitcoin and Ethereum are both public blockchains. The blockchain economic system conventions will be determined by the smart contracts, whenever stimulatory transactions are enforced autonomously. Blockchain became the buzzword when it gave a security boost to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2008.

Blockchain has revolutionized the exchange of information and media after the Internet. Blockchain is the basis for the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations which provides novel stages of crowd coordination by eradicating the trust and fault problems.

Diverse blockchains are available in the structures of the market to provide ease of configurational and comfortability to the end user.

Decentralized peer-to-peer blockchain technology has a lot to offer the complete system with its custom categories. There is no single authority that oversees how the laws are enforced. Anyone is free to join the public blockchain network.

## Bitcoin

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The blockchain began as a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. As a distributed database, a way is needed to independently verify the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount). The blockchain is a ledger stored on each network node as a copy of the "original" set of transactions. Every ten minutes or so, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the chain, and quickly published to all nodes.

In Wikipedia's article:

This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[1]

Listen to an audio reading of the original Bitcoin Whitepaper.

Look up research related materials by doing a Bitcoin search on Google Scholar.

## Ethereum

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From w:Ethereum

The stated purpose of the Ethereum project is to "decentralize the web" by introducing four components as part of its Web 3.0 roadmap: static content publication, dynamic messages, trustless transactions and an integrated user-interface. These are each designed to replace some aspect of the Web experience we currently take for granted, but to do so in a fully decentralised and pseudonymous manner.

It's important to identify and define the blockchain in a liberated way. Bitcoin, by definition can't monopolize the terms. Ethereum adds some features and frills:

The basic unit of the internal currency is called ether, which is divided into smaller units of currency called finney, szabo, shannon, babbage, lovelace, and wei.[1] Each larger unit is equal to 1000 of the next lower unit, so 1000 finney is 1 ether, 1000 szabo is 1 finney, and so on.

## The Libre Blockchain

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w:Libre ... to be continued

A large cryptocurrency mining rig.

## Discussion questions

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* Can a universal basic income be implemented through the use of cryptocurrencies?
* Can browser scripts be used to maintain a cryptocurrency with the consent of users?
* Could a cryptocurrency be created that rewards people with crypto coins for learning?

## Discussions

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### Researching Cryptocurrency Tipping to Incentivize Creative Common Contributions?

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Would researching cryptocurrency tipping to incentivize Creative Common contributions be a topic that is acceptable to publish research about onto this wiki? No problem if not. Michael Ten (discuss • contribs) 05:16, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

@Michael Ten: Sure! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:20, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

See Wikiversity:Research ethics. Be sure to disclose methodology, sources of funding, proposed process for recipients to receive funding, etc. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:05, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

### Block chain and decentralizing wikis

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* Could blockchain be utilized to decentralize MediaWiki wikis?

Possibly related Decentralizing Wikipedia and its sister projects

Source code (related to Arweave blockchain) (that is sort of a Web3 Twitter clone) that also uploads data to Arweave to decentralize and permanently archive all content Hey

Perhaps such technology could be utilized to build a MediaWiki extension that can pull content and write content to Arweave blockchain, and hence, using MediaWiki to decentralize MediaWiki wikis using akin to the open source technology developed for project Hey.

## Learning projects and resources

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* Basic income cryptocurrency
* Cryptoeconomics
* Creative Commons cryptocurrency motivators and tipping
* Decentralized autonomous organization
* Blockchain application in Global Health domain

## Readings

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* Wikipedia: Blockchain
* Wikipedia: Blockchain-based database
* Wikipedia: Cryptographic nonce
* Wikipedia: SegWit
* Wikipedia: Lightning Network
* Wikipedia: Ledger (journal)

## External learning links

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* Blockchain 101 - A Visual Demo [video]
* Discuss universal basic income implemented through cryptocurrencies on Reddit or start a conversation about it at Cryptocurrency basic income
* 6 GPU Ethereum Mining Rig Build Guide
* How to Build an Ethereum Mining Rig 2018

## References

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1. ↑ Wikipedia: Bitcoin#block_chain