Blockchain, new technology which became popular from 2017 was great shock. However, this concept was confused with ‘bitcoin’ by many people and blockchain technology’s concept became ambiguous due to bitcoin price boom and fall in 2017-2018.
Blockchain can be described by several key words, “decentralized, ledger, network, smart contract, security” and so on. Basic idea why blockchain can be summarized in one sentences, “it contains what we value”. When we approach in historical approach, human being imposed credit, meaning, value to something as symbols which are scarce. In ancient time, early human being used seashell as mean of exchange. Later, gold which is scarce, replaced seashells. Gold itself doesn’t mean gold have everywhere usage. But we reflected our society’s value to gold. So what we need can be exchanged with gold in the past. As capitalism develops, credit (written in contract paper) replaced gold, meaning that credit contracts were authorized as society’s value.
This credit based society system with contracts paper started to change as Information Technology develops. IT era made new product which is valuable. It is information collected through time. This information started to be collected from late 20th century. So, these data came up with new methodology to transfer and prove its value, it is “blockchain”.
Blockchain showed great development and lots of new blockchain technology were developed. This technology started from recording ownerships(ledger) with bitcoin which is classified as blockchain 1.0. Then Ethereum(blockchain 2.0) which contains smart contract in each nod were developed. After this lots of blockchains are developed with distinct characteristics and different goals. This report aims to introduce various blockchain technologies and classify them by information they contain.
Blockchain can be categorized by their underlying technology level(generation) determined by computation capabilities, transfer ability, privacy and so on. Blockchain 1.0 was Bitcoin and the simple alt-coins (like Litecoin) that were just cryptocurrencies. (1) This block contains ledger in their nod and share this to block holders. This ledger is very difficult to manipulate though it is shared by others due to its proving process. But this technology is quite limited usage such as ownership or transaction matters.
Blockchain 2.0 can be defined as blockchain technology which aims to apply blockchain technology to non-currency (bitcoin’s sector) sector such as Ethereum developed by Russian programmer. Ethereum plays crucial role in privacy, smart contracts and the emergence of non-native asset blockchain tokens and capabilities (2). Important characteristics of Ethereum is “smart contract” which enables block to contain contract data rather transaction record which is only thing that bitcoin can do. So Ethereum named as blockchain 2.0 since it overcame blockchain1.0(bitcoin).
Just like Ethereum named as blockchain2.0, blockchains that overcome the limitations of the current blockchain would be named 3.0. these technology is developing and looking for application in various fields such as payment, platform, Advertisement, Computation and so on. Such as EOS, OMG, TRX are listed as candidate of blockchain 3.0, but they are not completed thus requires attention to their development.
Writer: Daham Kim | kimfrancisco@unist.ac.kr
