#bitcoinassets

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Bitcoin: Programmable Assets For The First Time

Companies like PayPal (PYPL, -1.10%) have done a tremendous job making it easier to use our outdated financial infrastructure in a digital age, but they didn’t recreate the infrastructure itself. In contrast, blockchains are enabling new natively digital financial infrastructure in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others.

As a result, we can do new things: We have programmable assets for the first time.

I’ll give you two early examples within Bitcoin: multi-signature transactions and time-locked transactions. The former allows me to send Bitcoin to an address and specify that the value cannot be moved unless, say, two-of-three, or three-of-five people agree (or whatever parameters I set). Similarly, time-locked transactions allow me to send Bitcoin to an address and specify that it can’t be moved until some specific point in the future.

Both of these examples are things I could hack onto legacy financial infrastructure. I could create a trust, for example. But these things require hours of legal cost and logistics time. In Bitcoin, that cost and effort has been reduced to a few lines of code.

These are two early examples of what I believe will eventually be dozens and then hundreds of unique capabilities. Most encouragingly, young developers are picking up these puzzle pieces and assembling them in novel ways that could fundamentally change the fabric of finance and the way we transact.

http://fortune.com/2017/12/18/bitcoin-value-blockchain-capital/