How Will The Blockchain Change Venture Capital Investing?

A few months later into 2017 came a very informative article from Richard Kastelein going into detail on why VCs should care about initial coin offerings. Although it raised several important points, two jumped out at me: 1) ICOs could mean the liquidation of a significant portion of venture capital investing allowing for the democratisation of the space in a way that equity crowdfunding hasn’t quite done so yet, and 2) the return on investment is significantly higher. Hence, if adopted en masse, swathes of

Personally, I think that the intersection of VC and blockchain technology will result in the coming-of-age of liquid equity-style crowdfunding for blockchain innovations at the protocol level — this is being kicked off by projects like Ethereum, Tezos, Cosmos and Filecoin amongst others, and funds like Polychain. I’m completely sold on the idea that altcoins are here to stay and VC needs to get ready for it, but it’s important to remember that despite all the hype there is still a lot of noise around these tokens and many people still don’t understand what they are, how they work and why they have intrinsic value.

Source: How Will The Blockchain Change Venture Capital Investing?

Read More

Congressional Candidate Accepts Bitcoin Donations for 2018 Election Cycle | Bitcoin News

The US Federal Elections Commission (FEC) gave approval for political candidates to accept bitcoin back in 2014. According to the rules, this is a kind of “in-kind” donation, and each donor has a $100 cap on what they can provide. Once the candidate accepts it, they have 10 days to sale the bitcoin and place the returns into their campaign fund. An official document went into more detail:

Source: Congressional Candidate Accepts Bitcoin Donations for 2018 Election Cycle | Bitcoin News

Read More

Estonia could offer ‘estcoins’ to e-residents – e-Residency Blog | Medium

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has a keen interest in Estonia’s development as a digital nation and has provided valuable feedback for the estcoin proposal.

He believes estcoins could be used to incentivise investors to support the success of a country in a way that is not currently possible through existing means of raising international finance.
“An ICO within the e-Residency ecosystem would create a strong incentive alignment between e-residents and this fund, and beyond the economic aspect makes the e-residents feel like more of a community since there are more things they can do together,” says Buterin.

“Additionally if these estcoins are issued on top of a blockchain (they could possibly be issued in multiple formats at the same time, nothing wrong with this) then it would become easy and convenient to use them inside of smart contracts and other applications.”

Source: Estonia could offer ‘estcoins’ to e-residents – e-Residency Blog | Medium

Read More

The IRS Has Been Using Bitcoin Tracking Software Since 2015 | CoinDesk

The IRS states in the documentation that it’s using the software to “trace the movement of money through the bitcoin economy,” going on to explain:

“This is necessary to identify and obtain evidence on individuals using bitcoin to either launder money or conceal income as part of tax fraud or other Federal crimes.”

Source: The IRS Has Been Using Bitcoin Tracking Software Since 2015 – CoinDesk

Read More

Suppliers and retailers will use blockchain to keep food fresh | Engadget

IBM has joined with a group of food supply companies and retailers to use the computing company’s blockchain tech to keep food fresh. Currently, it can take up to two weeks to track down the source of contaminated foodstuffs. But just like tracking cryptocurrency transactions all over the world, this consortium will harness IBM’s enterprise blockchain services to give its members access to a constantly-updating ledger of food, from source to store.

2:05 We believe that transparency is the
2:07 ultimate goal. Blockchain will give us the
2:09 ability to not only track where food
2:11 came from but how was it produced. Was it produced safely?
2:14 Was it produced responsibly? Is it
2:16 sustainably grown? How many dates of
2:18 shelf sites are left on that product? The
2:19 food system is a shared responsibility.
2:21 And for blockchain and traceability and
2:23 transparency
2:24 to work we need a lot of
2:25 people working together.

Source: Suppliers and retailers will use blockchain to keep food fresh | Engadget

Read More

Former Paypal COO Discusses Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency, Argues ICOs Are Threat to VCs

Former paypal COO, David Sacks, discussed bitcoin and cryptocurrency during a recent interview with CNBC. During the interview, Sacks articulated that bitcoin is fulfilling the vision for a digital payment network originally held by Paypal, and expressed his belief that cryptocurrencies pose a significant threat to the venture capital sector.

Source: Former Paypal COO Discusses Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency, Argues ICOs Are Threat to VCs

Read More

Is Blockchain Technology the Biggest Disruption in Law? | Big Law Business

In the legal profession, quite a bit of time is spent researching and litigating whether a valid contract existed and, if it did, what the actual terms of the contract were. Traditionally stored on a single server with a single party having privileged control, most contracts are subject to questions of trust and the handling of the data. Blockchain – basically a distributed ledger, or list, of entries much like a stock ledger – breaks the information up into nodes across different servers and that can only be adjusted by an agreement of involved parties and, once updated, cannot be retroactively altered.

“Law and money have always evolved together. We are at a major change point of that evolution,” Alber added. “It seems probable that blockchain will become a basic infrastructure for process management inside law firms. It’s an important time and we should be paying attention to it.”

Source: Is Blockchain Technology the Biggest Disruption in Law? | Big Law Business

Read More