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0:00
Hello.
My name is Professor Karpovsky.
I'm a faculty member of the
Department of Information Systems
at the Carroll School of
Management at Boston College.
Today I'm going to talk about
the blockchain revolution.
0:16
Blockchain, in my view,
is one of the most important
technological innovations
of the last decade.
The invention of the
internet has been one of
the most impactful
digital innovations
in the last 4 decades.
It brought us the World
Wide Web, e-mail,
.com businesses, social
media, mobile web,
big data, cloud computing,
and the Internet of Things.
However, it has also
shown us its limitations.
We still can't trust one
another over the Internet.
There's a lack of
security on the Internet.
For example, we cannot
reliably exchange money
without a third party, like a
bank, involved in the transaction
to validate identities
and account information.
Blockchain technology
attempts to solve
Internet problems of privacy,
security, and inclusion
using cryptography, a
branch of mathematics
mathematics utilized
in computer science.
This innovation has already
started to change the world.
It is important to
explore this technology.
To further understand the
extent of its impact.
1:26
The concept of blockchain
was introduced in 2008 by
by Satoshi Nakamoto in
'Outline of Bitcoin',
a peer-to-peer payment network.
Before talking about what
blockchain technology is,
let's talk about the problem
that this technology
was trying to solve.
One of the major
issues related to
digital transactions
over the Internet,
is what we call the
double-spending problem.
In the physical world, in
a physical transaction,
ownership of a token
of an asset is clear
since physical dollar
bills, for example,
cannot easily copy and paste it.
When Alice sends
the token to Bob,
she no longer has the
token and Bob does.
However, in the digital space,
there needs to be an
assurance that virtual tokens
have not been promised
to more than one person.
What if Alice, for
example, made copies
or forgeries of
the digital token?
After all, a digital
token is nothing
but a string of ones and zeros.
How can Alice and Bob establish
unique ownership over
this digital token?
One answer to this problem
is to use a database,
a ledger.
This ledger will
track a single asset,
these digital tokens, that
Alice and Bob exchange.
When Alice gives Bob
a digital token,
the ledger records
the transaction.
Bob has the token
and Alice does not.
While the ledger allows
us to keep track of
