Posts Tagged ‘blockchain’
IBM Think Academy: Blockchain, How it works
What is Blockchain? Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. It fosters a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust, accountability and transparency—from contracts to deeds to payments.
Frees up capital flows, speeds up processes, lowers transaction costs and most importantly provides security and trust. We believe that Blockchain will do for business what the Internet did for communications.
Source: IBM Blockchain
Read MoreThe difference between public and private blockchain – Blockchain Unleashed: IBM Blockchain Blog
The sole distinction between public and private blockchain is related to who is allowed to participate in the network, execute the consensus protocol and maintain the shared ledger. A public blockchain network is completely open and anyone can join and participate in the network. The network typically has an incentivizing mechanism to encourage more participants to join the network. Bitcoin is one of the largest public blockchain networks in production today.
A private blockchain network requires an invitation and must be validated by either the network starter or by a set of rules put in place by the network starter. Businesses who set up a private blockchain, will generally set up a permissioned network. This places restrictions on who is allowed to participate in the network, and only in certain transactions. Participants need to obtain an invitation or permission to join. The access control mechanism could vary: existing participants could decide future entrants; a regulatory authority could issue licenses for participation; or a consortium could make the decisions instead. Once an entity has joined the network, it will play a role in maintaining the blockchain in a decentralized manner…
This type of permissioned blockchain model offers the ability to leverage more than 30 years of technical literature to realize significant benefits. Digital identity in particular, is fundamental for most industry use cases, be it handling supply chain challenges, disrupting the financial industry, or facilitating security-rich patient/provider data exchanges in healthcare. Only the entities participating in a particular transaction will have knowledge and access to it — other entities will have no access to it.
Source: The difference between public and private blockchain – Blockchain Unleashed: IBM Blockchain Blog
Read MoreBeyond Bitcoin: How Enterprises Can Integrate Blockchain | AppDynamics
Blockchain is already used in a handful of applications including cryptocurrency. This year, as more people set their minds to understanding the technology and finding creative applications, we will see a sharp increase in new use cases in industries as diverse as agriculture, finance, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing.
Click to read more about supply chain, food and beverage and “Limited blockchains”
The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, one-tenth of our GDP will have made its way onto the blockchain. For a nascent technology, that’s a bold prediction. But we’re living through a period of technological transformation that moves at unprecedented speeds. If you’re not already thinking about blockchain, you may already be behind.
References to what’s also known as Provenance and Private Blockchains
Read MoreBlockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast
Disintermediation is the investment magnet for blockchain-related ideas, riding on the success of the business and underpinned by peer-to-peer and crowdsourcing models. The promise of blockchain for enterprise goes beyond its role as an industry disruptor. It also has tremendous potential to improve existing business processes, as well as to improve efficiencies in existing transaction systems, leading to exponential cost saving for the enterprise and the end consumer. I like to draw the analogy of the impact of information dissemination due to the internet serving as an information network. Blockchain technology promises a similar explosion in trade, ownership, and trust, as the tenets of both technologies rely on principles of distributed governance and rules established for a time-tested protocol.
Source: Blockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast
Read MoreBasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.
Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain.
The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.
Source: BasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.
Takeaways
Despite the eye-candy of Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30 seconds for his browser startup Brave | TechCrunch, it is a prime example of how Blockchain promises disintermediation, or, compressing a transaction’s endpoints. All of today’s advertising middlemen, ad trackers and fraudulent players can be eliminated, or, drastically reduced.
By the way, if you’re swept up in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) aspect of this, then please take not the founder is Brendan Eich and his Venture Capital (VC) backers:
Read MoreFrom the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, with a solid team – funded by Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture among others.
Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business | TED Talk | TED.com
18 minutes and 49 seconds well spent!
What is the blockchain? If you don’t know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.
Thanks Jeff for the find!
Source: Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business | TED Talk
There really is more. just click below…
Read MoreIndia Is Likely To Become The First Digital, Cashless Society | Forbes
The top news out of India over the past 12 months has been Prime Minister Modi’s move to ban 85% of the currency in circulation. However, something much more far-reaching has happened.
…A 2015 report from MasterCard found that India was one of the countries least ready to transition to a digital payment system.
Yet, 12 months later such a system was rolled out.
If the transition to a digital society can happen in India, where just 2% of transactions were non-cash a few years ago, it can happen anywhere.
India Stack could fast-track the move to digital payment systems across the developed world and mark the end of cash.
Thanks Jeff for the find!
Source: India Is Likely To Become The First Digital, Cashless Society
Read MoreWhy this venture capitalist wants to make traditional VC obsolete | American Banker
BROCK PIERCE: I don’t need to do an ICO to raise my fund. Arguably, it’s not the right thing to do, because I have a traditional general partners/limited partners structure. But this is the future of how startups will be financed. I’ve been aware of it and following it, but I have a serious concern about how this stuff is being regulated. Most of the people doing ICOs today are creating very convoluted structures with the purpose of circumventing securities law, and in a lot of cases I don’t think it holds up. I think a lot of these deals have substantial regulatory overhang. Rather than circumvent regulations, let’s look at it and say, “Is this something that can be done within the rules? Can you do this compliantly?”
That’s what we set about doing over the last year. Timing is everything for me. I’ve been in the ICO market since day one [as a founding board member of Mastercoin], and it became very clear over the last year that the future is now. We’re off to the races. And so the question is, how does one do it legally?
Thanks Frédéic for the find!
Source: Why this venture capitalist wants to make traditional VC obsolete | American Banker
Read MoreBitcoin & Blockchain: What do They Mean for Financial Services? | Publications | Fasken Martineau
Blockchain and digital currencies are expected to change the way parties transact in coming years. It has been suggested that the Government of Canada is likely to issue a Canadian Dollar digital currency in the future. The Royal Canadian Mint has already issued a version of this known as MintChip. The Bank of Canada announced, in a closed media session at the 2016 Payments Panorama conference, that they had been experimenting with “The Jasper Distributed Ledger Settlement Platform.” This project introduced the concept of a possible “CAD-COIN.” This has placed Canada in a unique position in comparison to other jurisdictions, as the government is actively exploring the applications of this technology.
Source: Bitcoin & Blockchain: What do They Mean for Financial Services? | Publications | Fasken Martineau
Read MoreBlockchain — What You Need to Know | Harvard Business Review
Invest 23 minutes and listen to this!
Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School professor and co-founder of the HBS Digital Initiative, discusses blockchain, an online record-keeping technology that many believe will revolutionize commerce. Lakhani breaks down how the technology behind bitcoin works and talks about the industries and companies that could see new growth opportunities or lose business. He also has recommendations for managers: start experimenting with blockchain as soon as possible. Lakhani is the co-author of the article “The Truth
Takeaways
- Blockchain = Trust
- Disintermediation = “Bringing the ends of a transaction together” = An exponential level of disruption not seen since the introduction of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s (IMO)
- We are in the “dial-up days of Blockchain”
Source: Blockchain — What You Need to Know
(Click Read More to listen to the audio.)
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