n one of the more exciting developments in the Bitcoin space so far this year, noted Bitcoin angel investor and entrepreneur Roger Ver has given his blessing to a Bitcoin 2.0 application, and it's one that some may have overlooked in the past. Truthcoin, a Bitcoin sidechain designed by Yale Department of Economics Researcher Paul Sztorc, is described as a "peer-to-peer oracle system and prediction marketplace."

The platform is a decentralized method of bringing external data, such as the price of gold or the weather in a particular city, to the blockchain, which can then be used as the basis for complex smart contracts.

Roger Ver's backing of Truthcoin

Ver is excited about what may become possible through the use of a working implementation of Truthcoin, and shared the following statement via email: "I really do think that decentralized prediction markets may be the most important invention since Bitcoin, and will certainly change the way our world works."

The perpetual Bitcoin angel investor has been silently funding a C++ programmer who is building a working Truthcoin implementation using a fork of the original Bitcoin codebase. Some of this early code is now available on GitHub. Ver also shared some complimentary remarks in regard to Truthcoin Creator Paul Sztorc's understanding of the technical challenges ahead.

"Compared to Paul, I don't think there are many people on the planet" who could have created something like Truthcoin, Ver said. "Before meeting him, I already understood some of the benefits and exciting things that distributed prediction markets will bring to the world, so upon meeting Paul, he seemed like the right person to help make it a reality, so I agreed to get involved."