Deloitte Report: Over 26,000 Blockchain Projects Began in 2016 | CoinDesk

“The stark reality of open-source projects is that most are abandoned or do not achieve meaningful scale. Unfortunately, blockchain is not immune to this reality. Our analysis found that only 8 percent of projects are active, which we define as being updated at least once in the last six months.”

The authors add that organizations are a “positive differentiator” in the data, saying “while 7 percent of projects developed by users are active, 15 percent of projects developed by organizations are active.”

Source: Deloitte Report: Over 26,000 Blockchain Projects Began in 2016 – CoinDesk, Stan Higgins, November 8, 2017 at 13:30 UTC

Read More

IBM wants Canada to blockchainify its weed industry | TNW

“Blockchain is rapidly becoming a world leading technology enabling the assured exchange of value in both digital and tangible assets, while protecting privacy and eliminating fraud,” the proposal reads. “Its relevance to regulating cannabis is similar to its many chain of custody applications in areas such as pharmaceutical distribution and food chains.”

Source: IBM wants Canada to blockchainify its weed industry, Mix, November 6, 2017

Read More

Blockchain will disrupt the world of in-house counsel | Canadian Lawyer Mag

“I think this is the biggest innovation in computer science in a generation. For the first time in history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer-to-peer,” he said. “And trust is not achieved by counterparties and middlemen — trust is achieved by cryptography, by collaboration and by some very clever code.”

“Talk to your CTO, CFO and CIO and see if they are working on this”

Source: Blockchain will disrupt the world of in-house counsel | Canadian Lawyer Mag, Jennifer Brown, October 17, 2017

Thanks, Anna!

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

Blockchain is Eating Wall Street | Alex Tapscott | TEDxSanFrancisco – YouTube

Trust 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.

Read More

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 More

The 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

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

Read More

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

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.

Read More