disintermediation

IBM Think Academy: Blockchain, How it works

July 6, 2017

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

Blockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast

July 5, 2017

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

BasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.

July 5, 2017

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:

From 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

July 3, 2017

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…

Blockchain — What You Need to Know | Harvard Business Review

June 16, 2017

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.)