The Third Great Use Case for the Bitcoin Protocol - The Cryptographic Ledger

The Bitcoin community today well understands the Bitcoin Protocol as providing two great use cases. The first as a payment network for sending and recieving payments from all anywhere in the world, and the second as a store of wealth accessable to anyone.

However the Bitcoin community is only now seeing the third great use case for the bitcoin protocol, that is the universal cryptographic ledger. This use case has started off slowly with experiments such as Namecoin, and now Mastercoin, Counter Party, MaidSafe and other increasing using the cryptographic ledger of Bitcoin to track, send, and recieve their digital tokens.

This trend is accelerating with the maturing of technical solutions including notary chains, tree chains, and side chains which each promise a scalable way to offer ledger users greater flexability while still gaining the security advantages of the bitcoin blockchain.