Nope, this is not a reference to Paul Hollywood, nor is it a sentiment to Mary Berry, this is an article about baking, the new alternative to mining that is, all in all, most fantastic. The phrase seems to come from Tezos, a new smart contract and Dapp platform. As it stands, Tezos is now running a BetaNet and thus is well on the road towards a full launch, at the moment though, the project is still in its early stages. You can find out more about Tezos, for yourself, here- https://tezos.com/ Back to baking… In a post on Medium, Tezos Validator ArthurB has uploaded a post in which they describe the differences between baking and mining. You can see the full post on Medium, for yourself, here- https://medium.com/tezos/its-a-baker-s-life-for-me-c214971201e1 According to ArthurB:

“In Bitcoin, miners compete to publish blocks containing a proof-of-work stamp by repeatedly hashing block headers. In Tezos, block creation is done by bakers. Rather than deriving the right to create a block by finding the solution to a proof-of-work problem, bakers obtain that right when a Tezos token (or rather a roll, see below) they own (or that is delegated to them) is randomly selected to create a block.”

Moreover:

“A baker becomes aware of its right to bake blocks a few weeks in advance. When it does so, it is expected to create a safety deposit that will be held for a few weeks. This safety deposit is referred to in the white paper and in various places as a “bond”. In a few other proof-of-stake systems, this deposit is a single static set amount staked by a delegate. In contrast, in Tezos, the deposit dynamically changes depending on the number of blocks a delegate is set to create.”

Interesting, right? The full post on Medium does of course offer a deeper insight into this new design, I suggest if you get a moment, that you have a read (it should take you around 6 minutes to do so). What does all of this really mean? Ultimately, we could be seeing a brand-new revolution here in the way cryptocurrencies are ‘gathered’ from the network. Whilst mining has inherent advantages, it seems that baking does too, such advantages include:

• Resistance to DDoS attacks.
• Key Protection.
• Prevention of Mitigating Intrusion

This this going to be the start of an artisan-blockchain revolution? Who knows? Mining is such a familiar function that we should expect this new take to take some time to become a part of the blockchain mainstream, overall though, as an idea, baking really does seem to fix a few problems and vulnerabilities that mining does expose. As a result of this, we should at least be open to the idea that more and more new products could launch under this guise. Above all, this is sentiment to the growing nature of blockchain technology, as we can see, in many respects, the possibilities of the blockchain are quite literally endless.