Posts Tagged ‘smart contracts’
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 MoreFormer 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 MoreIs 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 MoreBlockchain is Eating Wall Street | Alex Tapscott | TEDxSanFrancisco – YouTube
Read MoreTrust is the expectation that the other party will abide by their commitments. That they will act with integrity. And it’s been very difficult to get people to do that. What if we could program that into the fabric of our economy? What if we had a new protocol, a trust protocol on top of which we could build any kind of business? So it’s an exciting time. One fraught with peril but also lots of possibilities. Because it appears that once again the technology genie has been unleashed from the bottle. Summoned by an unknown person or persons with unclear motives at a very uncertain time in history. This genie is once again at our disposal to broker, to fix a broken system and to transform the economic power grid and the old order of human affairs for the better if we will it.
Disrupting the trust business | The Economist
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
Read MoreThe Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology, by William Mougayar (Examples)
A sampling of Blockchain implementations sited in
Mougayar, William. The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology. Wiley
Read MoreBITNATION: 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
Read MoreInnovators 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.
Want VC Returns? This Firm Makes It Possible For Everyday People
A venture fund digital token could solve a problem in venture capital. “My phone is blowing up with other VCs saying I want to do this — not blockchain and bitcoin VCs — because the biggest problem with venture, the thing everyone hates about venture capital, is that it’s delivered fantastic returns but no one wants to invest in an asset that’s locked up for 5-10 years. The idea you can invest in a venture fund and have liquidity is probably the most innovative thing that has ever happened in venture capital.”
Stan Miroshnik, managing director of the Argon Group, an investment bank focused on cryptocurrency- and token-based capital markets, which will be managing the crowdsale, said the BCAP was significant for several reasons.
“What you don’t have in traditional LP investment is the freedom to sell your limited partner interest. There’s usually a redemption period, a redemption notice period, a valuation process and then it’s unclear what the value of your piece of the portfolio is. What’s unique here is not only do you have the freedom, but the secondary market tells you what the market’s view of the worth of this asset is,” he said
Source: Want VC Returns? This Firm Makes It Possible For Everyday People
Read MoreWant To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy — And Legal | Forbes
These crowdsales of new cryptocurrencies give entrepreneurs access to funding from the crowd, and token buyers, in turn, get something akin to a form of equity in the network, since, if the platform becomes more popular, the price for their shares should rise
Some of the thinking around the legality of ICOs stems from whether or not the token has utility, such as how people who buy a golf club membership presumably do so because the buyer wants to use the club, not because the value of the membership may rise. However, if developers sell a token before the network has launched, that muddies the distinction.
One characteristic of the sales on CoinList that may help curb some of the current rampant speculation is that they will only be open to accredited investors who earn $200,000 or more a year or have a net worth of at least $1 million. On the other hand, that might also dampen some of the enthusiasm for CoinList, because some have felt that ICOs have been democratizing finance and making venture-type deals available to the average retail investor rather than only the wealthy.
Still, both CoinList and SAFTS could be good antidotes to the problem of groups raising money before they have a product. It could get more groups to hold an ICO is held at the same time as the launch of the network, which, he says, “makes the crowdsale more about getting a piece of software instead of being an investor in a future piece of software.”
Source: Want To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy — And Legal
Read MoreHardware Oracles: Bridging the Real World to the Blockchain
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
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