Distributed Ledgers, Not Tokens, Are the True Heirs to Satoshi's Vision

Yes, these still include fundamental questions such as "What is a blockchain?" and "What is a blockchain good for?".

We struggle to understand the relationship between bitcoin and blockchain technology, between token systems and smart contracts, and between public blockchains and permissioned ones.

Simultaneously, another fight is going on about the value of different types of blockchain networks - specifically, whether blockchains should be "Public," so that anyone can join the networks, or "Permissioned," where the membership of the network is more or less fixed.

These two arguments are tightly linked: it turns out that token systems are more useful than smart contracts when layered on a public blockchain consensus protocol.

Looking back to the bitcoin white paper today, it is striking that Satoshi was exactly right about the best use for a public blockchain: a digital currency and payment system.

The white paper only talks about token systems and public blockchains, so we are left on our own to figure out how best to take his seminal invention and extend it to additional use cases.

Counterparty is a public blockchain smart contracts platform, albeit one focused on token issuance and trading, while Symbiont is a fintech company that develops and licenses its permissioned blockchain-based smart contracts system to improve the infrastructure of traditional financial markets.

In the realm of permissioned blockchains, on the other hand, smart contracts hold more promise.

A blockchain is a way for multiple parties in a decentralized computer network to see a consistent view of the world, so blockchain technology can primarily be valuable either when replacing a consistent centralized system with a consistent decentralized one, or when turning an inconsistent decentralized system into a consistent decentralized system.

Efforts to build complex smart contracts on public blockchain networks aren't tackling problems inherent in the design of existing decentralized systems; but rather are striving to become more usable versions of centralized systems.