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Banking and Finance Law

Boston University School of Law

Faculty Scholarship

Series

2017

Foundational Technology

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Payroll Tax & The Blockchain, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Ville Viitasaari Mar 2017

Payroll Tax & The Blockchain, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Ville Viitasaari

Faculty Scholarship

Bitcoin is an application that runs on blockchain technology. Blockchain is a foundational technology that is bringing in the second era of the Internet – the era where value can be transferred, rather than just information.

Blockchain is developing along a four-stage path similar to that which TCP/IP took. Both are foundational technologies. TCP/IP brought the Internet, and eventually brought significant (transformational) technological changes in business like Amazon.com and Skype. These are changes that could not have been forecast at the beginning of the Internet age.

Blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger. It replaces the inefficient use of multiple centralized …