You may have heard something being discussed in the media called “blockchain“.

Even if you haven’t heard about Blockchain, you almost certainly heard about Bitcoin.

Many financial experts and everyday people say that Bitcoin is a ‘bubble’ and even an outright scam.

Are they right saying that about Bitcoin?

I have no clue and to be honest, I don’t really care.

What I do think though is that the underlying technology on which Bitcoin runs (i.e. Blockchain) is revolutionary and has the potential to change many aspects of our lives (including how we source our electricity) in the not too distant future.

Many people think that Bitcoin and Blockchain are the same thing but that’s not true!

Bitcoin is just one of the applications using Blockchain technology. It’s kinda like email is one of the applications of the Internet (others being things like video streaming, chat, and social media).

Even Blockchain itself is a subset of a bigger group of technologies known as “Distributed Ledgers Technology” (or DLT for short). Basically, Blockchain is just one type of DLT.

The underlying technical principles upon which Blockchain and other DLTs run are quite complex to understand if you are not a technical person. However, their complexity doesn't mean that people won’t use them.

After all, you use a lot of things in your daily life that you don’t understand the internal workings of, right?

The most powerful part of DLT is behind the letter D = Distributed.

DLTs like Blockchain (remember that Bitcoin is just one of the Blockchains out there) allow people and computers to conduct digital transactions on a large scale without any central authority or server while essentially eliminating any chance of fraud.

Because of the secure and fraud-resistant nature of DLTs, they are also sometimes referred to as “trustless networks” because the people (and machines) who transact on these networks don’t have to trust some central authority, or even each other, in order to do business.

Security and fraud prevention are built into the way this technology works.

“That’s great, but what does that have to do with buying & selling electricity?”

Well, one of the things you can do with Blockchain (as well as other types of DLTs) is run what’s called “Smart Contracts” on it.

Like everything to do with Blockchain and DLT, Smart Contracts are quite a complex concept and are not easy to explain in ‘layman terms’.

However, in very simple terms, Smart Contracts are computer programs which automatically enforce certain rules (e.g. “if X happens, do Y”).

These smart contracts run on several blockchains (of which Ethereum is probably the most established and widely used at the moment) and there are two main differences between these ‘smart contracts’ and other computer programs:

They don’t run on a single computer or server (or even a group of servers). Instead, they run on the blockchain itself which means that any computer which is running this blockchain (sometimes called a ‘node’) has an exact copy of this computer program and all these copies are always in perfect sync with each other. Once a ‘smart contract’ is activated, it can never be changed! This means that the rules it is enforcing can never be modified, even by the programmers who originally wrote them.

One of the things you can do with these ‘smart contracts’ is buy and sell electricity directly between parties without having to go through an electricity retailer.

Confused? Here’s an example of one company which is trying to make this a reality:

Restart Energy is an electricity retailer based in Romania. They are creating a platform which utilizes DLT & Smart Contracts to allow people around the world to do the following:

Buy electricity directly from producers at prices that are cheaper than what is available elsewhere. The producers, on the other hand, will be able to get more for the electricity they produce than the wholesale rate available in their local area. This is a true win-win scenario. Send & Receive electricity around the world as easily as how you currently make PayPal payments or send an email.

Exciting times ahead!

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About Restart Energy

Restart Energy Democracy (RED) is a blockchain-powered platform, backed by Restart Energy — a European energy provider with 20 million USD in revenues. The company was built with a vision to democratize the energy sector and quash the dominance of legacy monopolies in the energy world. The company’s credentials include a customer base of 27,000 household and 3,000 corporate clients, expanding at more than 2,000 clients per month (5,000 new customers in the first two months of 2018), and its impressive growth: 1,700% from 2015 until today.

Restart Energy is developing the world’s first peer-to-peer, fully decentralized energy transfer platform allowing users to send and receive energy worldwide, based on its proprietary virtual balancing system, that uses A.I., Big Data, and IoT technologies. The RED ecosystem is comprised of the RED-Platform, RED-Franchise, and MWAT Tokens.

For more information about Restart Energy, please visit the website, Telegram, and read the Restart Energy whitepaper. Join the announcement channel for updates regarding Restart Energy Democracy.