Social and Cultural Uses of the Blockchain
* Article: Beyond Cryptocurrency: Social and Cultural Uses of the Blockchain. By Dan M I Hassan.
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Abstract
Dan M I Hassan:
"Blockchain technology was first introduced in 2009. Since then, the technology has changed the landscape of digital currency and the way in which data is stored, contributing a new tool for information distribution. From the inception of blockchain technology, it has been connected to the world's first decentralised digital currency, Bitcoin. This overarching link has however taken attention away from the uses of the technology outside of the economic, and initiatives using the Bitcoin blockchain for 'social and cultural' uses remain largely unexplored. Given this gap, this report describes a tool to facilitate investigating the questions: to what extent has the Bitcoin blockchain been used for 'social and cultural' purposes, and how has this changed over time? The report describes a web-based application, ‘openblockchain’ (OBC), which uses Bitcoin-QT, Cassandra, Docker, node.js, React, Scala and Spark to search for metadata stored in the Bitcoin blockchain that document possible 'social and cultural' uses. It additionally demonstrates the application of Agile software development practices in the delivery of a modular, stable and scalable web application."
More information
- The software designed, developed and maintained by Dan Hassan <[email protected]> as part of this project is available at: http://openblockchain.info https://github.com/open-blockchain/
- Dan Hassan is active in autonomous co-operatives, blockchain research/development & big (enough) data analytics http://dan.dyne.org/