Description: R&D center of excellence about scarcity in the digital domain (Bitcoin and crypto-assets) and blockchain.
DGI is a research and development center of excellence about “scarcity in the digital realm”: Bitcoin, crypto-assets, and the underlying blockchain technology. Focused on consulting services, training programs, and software solutions, we are engaged in the scientific and academic debate, where the cypherpunk movement meets the Austrian school of economics. Cryptography, monetary theory, computer networking, and game theory: we explore all cornerstones and can assist in understanding them.
The most successful attempt at creating scarcity in the digital realm without a trusted third party, Bitcoin is a bearer asset that can be transferred (over computer networks using private/public key cryptography) but not duplicated. Accessible to anyone, it is intrinsic to a public distributed uncensorable settlement ledger , known as blockchain, updated with cryptographic techniques and secured by large amounts of energy in the form of computational work (mining). Bitcoin is the digital equivalent of gold
Blockchain is an append-only sequential data structure: to change a block in the middle of the chain all subsequent blocks need to be changed. Very inefficient if compared to a relational database, it is mostly an idiosyncratic technology for digital scarcity. Indeed, blockchain requires an intrinsic native digital asset to provide the economic incentives for the blockchain maintainers to be honest. Without the seigniorage revenues associated to its native asset, a blockchain system would need to select and