When the rare great idea occurs to me, on the scale of "I'm surprised nobody has thought of this!" the next thought I have is "Hey, somebody probably already thought of it and did it better. Or, if it hasn't happened yet, it will soon." So I waited it out. And here it is!
It's called ethereum. It takes the basic blockchaining concept pioneered by bitcoin (the idea of which I don't understand enough to feel comfortable elaborating on here. Again, many other people can explain it better than me) and generalizes it enough to be used for almost anything.
Why is this important? I've been interested in self-regulating open source gaming communities. That is, how can a developer release a free open source game that allows the community to find and connect with each other, without having to maintain a central server to host all the games? ... I still don't know actually, but this solves a part of that puzzle. I'm hoping that by the time I figure out that part of the equation that somebody has already solved it too.
