provenance

Disrupting the trust business | The Economist

July 19, 2017

Will the centre hold?
These efforts give a taste of what will be possible, says Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures (USV), a venture-capital firm. He thinks that such decentralised organisations could one day disrupt the tech giants. At their heart, he argues, those tech titans are gigantic centralised databases, keeping track of products and purchase histories (Amazon), users and their friends (Facebook), and web content and past search queries (Google). “Their value derives from the fact that they control the entire database and get to decide who sees which part of it and when,” he says.

In some areas the blockchain may even make life easier for governments. Last year Dubai announced that it wants all government documents secured on a blockchain by 2020, a prerequisite for agencies to become completely paperless. The technology could also be used as a cheap platform to generate what poor countries lack most: more efficient government and trust in contracts. And some hope that the blockchain could make the United Nations work better by helping it keep track of all its programmes, creating transparency and reducing waste.

Source: Disrupting the trust business | The Economist

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology, by William Mougayar (Examples)

July 18, 2017

A sampling of Blockchain implementations sited in
Mougayar, William. The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology. Wiley

BITNATION: Governance 2.0

Otonomos your instant company incorporation| Manage your companies online with Otonomos | Otonomos BCC Pte. Ltd.

BoardRoom | Blockchain Governance Suite

Guardtime secures over a million Estonian healthcare records on the blockchain

La’Zooz – A value system designed for sustainibility

MaidSafe – The New Decentralized Internet

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology, by William Mougayar

July 18, 2017

Innovators Dilemma
It is difficult to innovate within your business model, because you will typically attempt to tie everything back to it, resulting in a shortsighted and limited view of what is possible. This is especially true if your business has a trust-related function (such as a clearinghouse). Current intermediaries will encounter the hardest change, because the blockchain hits at the core of their value proposition. They will need to be creative, and dare disrupting themselves while folding some blockchain capabilities under their offerings, and creatively developing new value proposition elements. They will need to realize that it is better to shoot yourself in the foot, rather than to have someone else shoot you in the head. This will not be an easy transition, because changing business models could be difficult to achieve in large organizations for a variety of factors.

Hardware Oracles: Bridging the Real World to the Blockchain

July 15, 2017

Cryptographically attestable anti-tampering sensors

To be able to securely report a reading (from any kind of sensors), the combination of the following is necessary:

a cryptographic attestation of the sensor reading, authenticating the origin of the measure: each device has a private key signing outgoing payloads (with a nonce to avoid replays)

an anti-tampering installation of the reader device, rendering it inoperable (by wiping the private key) in case of manipulation attempt (connect to another object, inject false stimuli, etc.)

These secure reading devices are called Hardware Oracles, and are the gateways from the physical work to the Blockchain realm.

Source: Hardware Oracles: bridging the Real World to the Blockchain

Blockchain Oracles – BlockchainHub

July 15, 2017

Blockchains cannot access data outside their network on their own. An oracle – also known as data feed – is a third party service designed for use in smart contracts on the blockchain. They provide external data when needed and push it onto the blockchain.

Such conditions could be any data like weather temperature, successful payment, price fluctuations, etc. Smart contracts contain value and only unlock that value, if certain pre-defined conditions are met. When a particular value is reached, the smart contract changes its state and executes the programmatically predefined algorithms, automatically triggering an event on the blockchain. The primary task of oracles is to provide these values to the smart contract in a secure and trusted manner.

An oracle, in the context of blockchains and smart contracts, is an agent that finds and verifies real world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used by smart contracts.

There are four different types of oracles based on the type of use. We differentiate between software oracles, hardware oracles, consensus oracles and inbound and outbound oracles.

Source: Blockchain Oracles – BlockchainHub

Announcing The Town Crier Service

July 15, 2017

Why do we need Oracles?

Smart contracts confined to on-chain data are like sports cars on local roads. They’re purring with latent power, but can’t do anything really interesting.

To unleash their potential, smart contracts need access to the wide open vistas of data available off-chain, i.e., in the real world. A financial smart contract needs access to equity, commodity, currency, or derivative prices. An insurance smart contact must be aware of triggering events such as bad weather, flight delays, etc. A smart contract allowing consumers to sell online games to one another must confirm that a seller successfully transferred game ownership to a buyer.Latent power waiting to be unchained…

Today, though, smart contracts can’t obtain such data in a highly trustworthy way. And they can’t achieve data privacy. These deficiencies are starving smart contract ecosystems of the data they need to achieve their full promise.

Source: Announcing The Town Crier Service

Blockchain: Massively Simplified | Richie Etwaru | TEDxMorristown – YouTube

July 6, 2017

Richie Etwaru, discusses the opportunity and implications of blockchain as a paradigm to slow/close the expanding trust gap in commerce. He unpacks blockchain to a level of simplicity to be consumed by those who are just starting to understand and explore the paradigm. He lays out a current state of commerce, suggesting that every company is currently at risk of being disrupted or incurring severe strain from a blockchain version of itself.

Every company in the world today, not just the intermediaries, are at risk of having competition from a blockchain version of themselves.

We are at the ground floor of a new paradigm in humanity that will change the human experience called Blockchain. The thing it is going to change is Trust.

Takeaway

Blockchain in one word: “Trust”

Provenance | Case Studies

July 6, 2017

Tracking sustainability claims through global chains

Can we prove that products are sustainably-sourced and slavery-free? In an international pilot, working with IPNLF and 12 tuna producers, we used Provenance to track fish through the complex Southeast Asian fishing industry for the UK, Japanese and US markets.

Pioneering a new standard for trust in food retail

How can we empower customers all along the supply chain with data they can trust? Provenance partnered with the UK’s largest consumer co-operative The Co-op to track fresh produce, and their product claims, from origin to supermarket.

Increasing transparency in fashion with blockchain

Can tech help boost trust and transparency in the fashion industry? Collaborating with businesses along a UK-based fashion supply chain, we’ve used blockchain to track raw alpaca fleece from farm to finished garment.

Boosting the value of small, independent food brands

How does the Provenance platform benefit small businesses? Enabling producer, shop and shopper to collaborate on product stories and journeys, Provenance demonstrated a new way to increase trust and visibility for independent brands.

Showcasing craftsmanship via smart labels
How can we give shoppers the information they need to chose your product? Provenance presents the journey of material to finished product through interactive labels.

Raising the value of single-origin coffee
How can single-origin coffee producers prove the provenance of their product? We trial location data verification to differentiate between authentic single-origin coffee from mere marketing buzz.

Tracking towards a circular future for cotton
How can tech help cotton producers increase demand for the sustainable, renewable and biodegradable, fabric? We use Provenance to track cotton from origin to finished good and beyond, closing the loop.

Source: Provenance | Case Studies

From Farm To Finished Garment: Blockchain Is Aiding This Fashion Collection With Transparency | Forbes

July 6, 2017

Each garment has a unique digital token, enabling Provenance to verify every step of its production and create a digital history of that information including location data, content and timestamps, all of which is presented to consumers via an interface they can access through their item’s QR code or NFC-enabled label (so that it works on both Apple and Android devices).

Another keyword for the blockchain therefore is storytelling. As Drinkwater adds: “Where transparency and sustainability play a part, then there’s really beautiful storytelling to be told. And brands can do that actually fairly easily. For Martine, there was a real desire to show off the craftsmanship and ability [of the partners]. Rather than just presenting the final product, it enables every partner to show off their expertise and their brilliance in a very visual and engaging way. Ordinarily when you look at a finished product you never think about that.”

Source: From Farm To Finished Garment: Blockchain Is Aiding This Fashion Collection With Transparency

Will Provenance Be the Blockchain’s Break Out Use Case in 2016? – CoinDesk

July 6, 2017

Much has been said about the blockchain as an ownership layer. But what exactly does that mean?

It means that blockchains represent ownership of an asset in terms of control over the data relating to that asset. In other words, only the current owner can authenticate a transaction that would cause that asset to be transferred to another owner.

This is provenance expressed in protocol form. The word “provenance” is derived from the French “provenir” which means “to come from”, and is used to describe the custodial chronology of an object.

Provenance is one of the backbones of economies, whether it relates to artifacts or real estate. There has always been a need to authenticate that a party actually owns an asset prior to any business dealing involving that asset, to ensure that the asset is “true” rather than stolen or faked.

In the past, trusted third-parties have traditionally played this role.

However, blockchains can streamline this function by serving as the infrastructure for registering and authenticating asset ownership between untrusting parties with common interests.

Source: Will Provenance Be the Blockchain’s Break Out Use Case in 2016? – CoinDesk