A blockchain explanation your parents could understand | Jamie Skella | Pulse | LinkedIn

It’s happening in an increasingly frequent manner: “Jamie, explain this blockchain stuff to me. I’ve read a bunch of articles and I’m no wiser.” The problem with most blockchain explainers is that they provide more detail than what matters to most people, using language that is foreign to most people, which winds up leaving people more confused than when they started. Instead, without worrying about being a technically perfect description, here’s an explanation of blockchain your parents could understand…

Source: A blockchain explanation your parents could understand | Jamie Skella | Pulse | LinkedIn

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What Are Smart Contracts? A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Contracts

Example: Suppose you rent an apartment from me. You can do this through the blockchain by paying in cryptocurrency. You get a receipt which is held in our virtual contract; I give you the digital entry key which comes to you by a specified date. If the key doesn’t come on time, the blockchain releases a refund. If I send the key before the rental date, the function holds it releasing both the fee and key to you and me respectively when the date arrives. The system works on the If-Then premise and is witness

Actually, when it comes to smart contracts, we’re stepping into a sci-fi screen. The IT resource center, Search Compliance suggests that smart contracts may impact changes in certain industries, such as law. In that case, lawyers will transfer from writing traditional contracts to producing standardized smart contract templates, similar to the standardized traditional contracts that you’ll find on LegalZoom. Other industries such as merchant acquirers, credit companies, and accountants may also employ smart contracts for tasks, such as real time auditing and risk assessments. Actually, the website Blockchain Technologies sees smart contracts merging into a hybrid of paper and digital content where contracts are verified via blockchain and substantiated by physical copy.

Source: What Are Smart Contracts? A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Contracts

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ICOs and VCs | AVC

So, while ICOs represent a new and exciting way to build (and finance) a tech company, and are a legitimate disruptive threat to the venture capital business, they are not something I am nervous about and they are not something USV is nervous about. We are excited about them when they are the right thing for our portfolio companies and we are encouraging those companies to use this new approach. We are also investing in tokens, through token funds, and directly on or own.

Thanks Chris for the find!

Source: ICOs and VCs – AVC

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What is An Initial Coin Offering? The Future of Fundraising (ICO) | Blockgeeks

ICO is the abbreviation of Initial Coin Offering. It means that someone offers investors some units of a new cryptocurrency or crypto-token in exchange against cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Since 2013 ICOs are often used to fund the development of new cryptocurrencies. The pre-created token can be easily sold and traded on all cryptocurrency exchanges if there is demand for them. With the success of Ethereum ICO are more and more used to fund the development of a crypto project by releasing token which is somehow integrated into the project. With this turn, ICO has become a tool that could revolutionize not just currency but the whole financial system. ICO token could become the securities and shares of tomorrow.< /blockquote>

Source: What is An Initial Coin Offering? The Future of Fundraising (ICO) – Blockgeeks

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What next for blockchain? | McKinsey & Company

Video available at source

On the consumer side, if I’m being really honest, there isn’t a tremendously compelling use case for somebody like me—somebody who lives in New York, higher socioeconomic status, who’s fairly well served by the current financial system. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t mean that the system that serves me fairly well is a good system. Right? When you actually dig into the financial system as we know it today, it’s fairly antiquated. It’s primarily built on technology that was created in the 1970s.

Source: What next for blockchain? | McKinsey & Company

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Getting serious about blockchain | McKinsey & Company

Video available at source

If you’re the CEO of a big company, the first thing is to conceptualize this right. This is not like another technology, like AI [artificial intelligence], the cloud, robots, drones, the Internet of Things, and all of the rest of the stuff that are part of this fourth industrial revolution.This is the transactional platform that will enable all of those things to be part of the economy. When we have autonomous vehicles moving around, all of those transactions, everything from how they power themselves to how people pay for them, will be done through a distributed ledger. The Internet of everything needs a ledger of everything for it to work.

Source: Getting serious about blockchain | McKinsey & Company

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2017 Global Digital IQ® Survey: 10th anniversary edition

… in some ways company leaders are no better equipped to handle the changes coming their way than they were in 2007. In fact, Digital IQ—the measurement of an organization’s abilities to harness and profit from technology—has actually declined since we began asking executives to self-assess their own organizations. Enterprises aren’t so much falling behind as struggling to keep up with accelerating standards. And looking ahead, it is clear most are not ready for what comes next—and after that—as technologies continue to combine and advance, and new ways of doing business go from inception to disruption seemingly overnight.

Source: 2017 Digital IQ: PwC

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Blockchain digital process: PwC

But over the long term, the greatest promise is with intricate forms of agent-managed peer-to-peer automation—a highly efficient Internet of Things empowered by an Internet and web of agents, smart transactions, and contracts. The rest of the 2010s likely will be a period of tinkering, comparable in some ways to the late 1990s. Considering there are hundreds of both blockchain and artificial intelligence startups, and sizeable venture capital (VC) investments across both, the possibility also looms of a boom-and-bust period that could mirror the dot-com era in its breadth and depth. By the time the last half of the 2020s materializes, companies might have made their way through what Gartner calls a Trough of Disillusionment to the adoption of a transactional environment very different from today’s.

Source: Blockchain digital process: PwC

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