Agoracom Blog Home

Posts Tagged ‘blockchain’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – 2019: The Year Blockchain Begins Finance’s Great Unbundling $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 9:06 AM on Thursday, December 27th, 2018

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

Idk large
———————
  • Blockchain has already started to level the playing field by disrupting correspondent banking and democratizing payments.
  • In 2019, blockchain will start to move beyond payments and will begin to unbundle securities, loans and other derivative financial products. Companies like Securitize*, Dharma, Dydx, Compound Finance and The Ocean are all interesting companies working on the next phase of Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

Asheesh Birla Dec 27, 2018 at 10:00 UTC

Asheesh Birla is senior vice president of product at Ripple.

The following is an exclusive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review. 

Industries across the board – from cable companies to grocery stores – are desperately trying to hold on to their most prized possession: the bundle. The conventional wisdom goes “if you control access and distribution then consumers have little choice to go anywhere else.”

Unfortunately for sleepy incumbent bundlers, we’ve seen companies like Netflix and Amazon unbundle nearly every part of our lives. The same is now underway in crypto and finance, where some of the largest financial institutions are seeing their bundles face serious headwinds.

As the unbundling picks up in 2019, I expect it create opportunities for smart blockchain companies that can find their niche and be successful. But with that opportunity also comes great risk. If entrepreneurs and builders get over their skis or promise too much – like many did in early 2018 – they risk losing credibility and giving away their first-mover advantage.

Asia Leads the Way

For decades, the largest global financial institutions controlled much of the financial system underpinning the global economy.

Blockchain has already started to level the playing field by disrupting correspondent banking and democratizing payments. In 2019, blockchain will start to move beyond payments and will begin to unbundle securities, loans and other derivative financial products. Companies like Securitize*, Dharma, Dydx, Compound Finance and The Ocean are all interesting companies working on the next phase of Decentralized Finance (DeFi).

Over the last several years, mobile app companies like Grab, Gojek and Paytm have expanded their offerings to include payments, investments, remittances, loans and insurance. They are rapidly capturing newly banked consumers as many Asian economies move from cash to digital.

Regulators in Asia are providing clearer guidelines on blockchain and crypto projects, partially because they consider blockchain a catalyst for economic growth.

Additionally, over 80 percent of all cryptocurrency trading volume is based out of Asia, so there is strong appetite to build out a workable infrastructure. If Grab, Gojek, and Paytm can control distribution to a newly banked set of consumers, they’ll then start to look towards blockchain to source a better experience for payments, loans and other derivative financial products.

Back to basics

Over the last few years, the crypto space deviated from the original vision of financial access, which was well articulated in Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper. Similar to the internet boom and bust, nearly every imaginable use case from tracking flower freshness to Kodakcoin used blockchain as a buzzword to gain influence and attract eyeballs.

However, just like the early internet, use cases have to match where the technology is in its development stage.

For example, Netflix wouldn’t have been successful streaming TV shows in the year 2000 when fewer than one percent of people had access to broadband. In the last few years, it’s become clear that payments are the one use case where blockchain works today.

In 2019, blockchain will build on this momentum and branch into decentralized finance applications such as loans and insurance products that leverage blockchain-based smart contract platforms.

I’ve always found that some of the best building happens in down markets. As long as builders can stay focused on solving very specific use cases, we will see more competition, innovation and a much-needed unbundling.

That’s a great thing for the entire industry.

Disclosure: Ripple’s Xpring is an investor in Securitize.

Have an opinionated take on 2018? CoinDesk is seeking submissions for our 2018 in Review. Email news [at] coindesk.com to learn how to get involved.

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/2019-the-year-blockchain-begins-finances-great-unbundling

Tags: , ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, Canadian Blockchain Stocks, Smallcap Blockchain stocks, ThreeD, ThreeD Capital | Comments Off on ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – 2019: The Year Blockchain Begins Finance’s Great Unbundling $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

St-Georges’ subsidiary #ZeU Crypto Entered Agreement to Provide Credit Card & Remittance Provider Prego International with #Blockchain Technology Solutions

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 7:52 AM on Monday, December 24th, 2018
  • Executed an agreement with Prego International Group AS to develop and integrate certain proprietary technologies in a Global Multi Payment and E-Money Services Platform
  • Prego, based in Norway, is a global payment solution provider which develops and operates a range of payment services for partners and clients worldwide

Montreal / December 23, 2018 – St-Georges Eco-Mining Corp. (CSE: SX) (OTC: SXOOF) (FSE: 85G1) is pleased to announce that on December 21, 2018, it executed an agreement with Prego International Group AS to develop and integrate certain proprietary technologies in a Global Multi Payment and E-Money Services Platform.

Prego, based in Norway, is a global payment solution provider which develops and operates a range of payment services for partners and clients worldwide, including Everyday Digital, a solution which is Prego`s proprietary white label alternative e-money and payment platform. Everyday Digital is fully flexible and configurable, combined on conventional processing platform, integrated with blockchain technology with real-time processing providing everything from specific payment functionality to full current accounts including Direct Debit, Faster Payments, CHAPS, BACS and contactless Visa & MasterCard debit cards and Closed Loop payment cards (Virtual Everyday $ cards).

Under the Agreement, ZeU and Prego will share equally the costs of the Services as follows:

  • – Phase 1 – preface/innovation lab: USD$675,000, which shall include the setup cost and license fees of the full platform, prepared for pilot operational phase (timeline – Q2 2019); – Phase 2 – pilot operational: USD$750,000, which shall include full system integration with “POC” testing and user testing with stress test of the platform in 60 days with a complete report (timeline – Q3 2019); and – Phase 3 – project launched and running – upscale/internationalization. It shall include a full platform, service ready to go, for implementation in multiple global markets. (timeline – Q4 2019).

“(…) We believe that this technology agreement will open opportunities to provide blockchain based services combined with conventional payment services to the market in a very smart and user friendly way.(…) This agreement will strengthen both companies market opportunities and will pave the way to many more new initiatives to come (…) commented Ronald Erikson, Prego Executive Chairman.

Frank Dumas, President and CEO of ZeU, indicated that “The team at ZeU is excited to be working with Prego to provide a key complement to the foundation for its advanced end-to-end Global Multi Payment and E-Money Services, deploying proprietary software, and innovative business models. We expect to leverage the equal revenue sharing agreement between the two companies to accelerate the development and deployment of our business initiative (…)”

Other Corporate Matters

BigData on Blockchain

In early December, ZeU filed for an additional provisional patent named ‘System and Method for Augmenting Database Applications with Blockchain Technology’.

The application developed by ZeU and related to this invention patent provides a migration method that allows a database application that accesses a local database to be synchronized with a blockchain. Data to be written into the database, but requiring synchronization, will be sent to a blockchain for consensus voting automatically, and only the data that gets consensus is made to persist and viewed by application. It also allows a software application to access a local relational database and via a migration service synchronize the status and data of the database with blockchain. The data is sent to the blockchain for consensus automatically, and only thereafter viewed by the application. This approach resolves transaction conflicts both in local nodes and globally. The invention is protocol agnostic and ZeU management believe that it could be used as a gateway to share data between application using different protocols.

Additional Patent Applications

ZeU management is working on additional patents related to random number generation and encryption in relation with blockchain application. These technologies are being developed to be used in payment solutions, gambling industry and secure messaging.

CSE Listing

ZeU is pursuing its listing process on the CSE and expect to be listed in Q1 2019.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

“Frank Dumas”

FRANK DUMAS, DIRECTOR & COO / President & CEO of ZeU Crypto Networks Inc..

About St-Georges

St-Georges is developing new technologies to solve the some of the most common environmental problems in the mining industry.

The Company controls directly or indirectly, through rights of first refusal, all of the active mineral tenures in Iceland. It also explores for nickel on the Julie Nickel Project & for industrial minerals on Quebec’s North Shore and for lithium and rare metals in Northern Quebec and in the Abitibi region. Headquartered in Montreal, St-Georges’ stock is listed on the CSE under the symbol SX, on the US OTC under the Symbol SXOOF and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol 85G1.

The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or the accuracy of the contents of this release.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in St Georges Eco-Mining Technologies | Comments Off on St-Georges’ subsidiary #ZeU Crypto Entered Agreement to Provide Credit Card & Remittance Provider Prego International with #Blockchain Technology Solutions

ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – #Blockchain And #Crypto Leaders Share Their 2019 Industry Predictions $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 10:37 AM on Friday, December 21st, 2018

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

Idk large
—————–


  • I am sticking to my original prediction – Bitcoin will hit 250k by 2022.” – Tim Draper, American Venture Capitalist, Author, Founder of Draper Associates, DFJ and Draper University

Rachel Wolfson Contributor 

Following the ICO boom in 2017, along with Bitcoin’s all time high of nearly $20k last December, the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry has gone down a rocky road. As the crypto world is full of surprises, it’s difficult to predict what’s in store for the future. Yet it’s interesting to hear what industry insiders and some of the biggest influencers in the space have to say about their expectations for the crypto and blockchain industry over the next 12 months and beyond.

Cryptocurrency:

I am sticking to my original prediction – Bitcoin will hit 250k by 2022.” – Tim Draper, American Venture Capitalist, Author, Founder of Draper Associates, DFJ and Draper University

As one of the leading cryptocurrencies, Ether will see its price reach the $500 mark by mid 2019. The fact still remains that most blockchain projects across the world are being done in Ethereum. As its use cases increase and improve globally, we’ll see it continuing to gain more solid ground as a smart contract protocol.” – David Drake, Founder and Chairman of LDJ Capital

2019 will be an exciting year. We will see several great products shipped to market, especially from our Binance Labs incubation program, now taking place on five continents. The projects and teams who are focused on building and achieving product-market fit will bring more real use cases to our lives. This will open the gateway to the mass adoption of crypto.” – Ella Zhang, Head of Binance Labs

The first legitimate national cryptocurrency will be launched, linked to a fiat currency from a G-20 nation. This digital asset will be in high demand for combining the benefits of a digital asset with the stability of a government-backed currency. Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 New Year’s resolution to “study cryptocurrencies” will result in one being integrated into Facebook for payments. The only question is whether they will use an existing cryptocurrency or a new one created by Facebook.” – Mitch Liu, Theta Labs CEO

Blockchain:

2018 was a tough year, but we have a longer term outlook for our industry. The builders have been building in 2018, so for 2019, I think we will see a lot of real products and real applications coming into the market.” – Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Binance CEO and Founder

I have been involved in the blockchain space since 2013, actively developing with Ethereum since January 2015. During this time I have experienced many ups and downs. Many times I heard how “Blockchain is over.” However, the fact is that the underlying technological innovation continues to evolve and to get better. We have more tools today, documentation, tutorials, and users than ever before and this will continue to grow as the user interfaces become better and more seamless. In 2019 we will continue to live the aftermath of 2017. ICOs have been in winter sleep for most of 2018, following the ICO madness we experienced, which was initiated by my ERC-20 standard. Nevertheless, this doesn’t change the fact that ICO’s are a great fundraising mechanism, for those projects in which a coin offering makes sense. However, many past token projects were only using ICOs as an opportunity to collect money without a truly decentralized and functioning token economy in the background. We need to regain the trust that was lost, and proposals like my Reversible ICO shows how technology can be the transaction mechanism and the regulator at the same time. – Fabian Vogelsteller, LUKSO CEO and Ethereum developer responsible for co-creating the ERC-20 Token Standard

You’ll see blockchain companies with differentiated business models separating themselves from the pack. For the industry to mature and gain legitimacy, the 2018 shakeout had to happen. As you’ve seen with the rise of the internet, e-commerce and just about every other big-thought thing that’s happened in the last 50 years, the gold rush days come to an end, rules get created and people settle down to do real business. That’s why we’ve kept our focus, powered forward and invested in building our vision for the next iteration of the web. For TRON, 2019 will be a year of many innovations. We’re the largest decentralized content ecosystem in the world, and 2019 will be about showing people what that means. We’re beginning the year with our first summit, in San Francisco, where we’ll reveal big details about how we plan to integrate blockchain with BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer technology. And we’ll follow that by offering our 100 million monthly BitTorrent users incentives to create and share more freely and often, delivering an economy of goods and services within the network.” – Justin Sun, TRON CEO and Founder

2019 will be a historic year for the Blockchain industry. Malta will issue the first license for operators in this sphere to be able to operate in a regulated environment. Thus, 2019 will see the materialization of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry. We are aware where the compass is pointing, which is why blockchain technology will be incorporated into our ecosystem. In turn, we will soon start witnessing change in the landscape of how sectors as we know today operate. In fact, as a Government, we’re looking at using blockchain technology in the public sector to better the experience of our citizens. 2019 will be an even more exciting year for Malta. The smallest EU member state will be amongst the top 10 nations with a National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. This will open doors for the exploration of new economic niches such as esports, gaming and Fintech. Malta’s agility and flexible approach will ensure that we will remain innovators in the digital economy.” – The Honorable Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, Digital Economy & Innovation

We hope to see some more progress happening towards the setting up of a true interoperability standard for optimal communication between different types of blockchain networks. We believe that there will be some more hybrid deployments involving the joint use of permissionless and permissioned blockchain networks, with a focus on real world use cases where the use of blockchain technology can truly move the needle forward.” – Nimit Sawheny, Voatz CEO

Blockchain communities and open source communities will see their lines blurred, as the two become synonymous with one another. Open source has traditionally been on the cutting edge of innovation and has garnered massive interest because of its ability to deliver security through transparency. Decentralization is the latest cutting-edge technology and it shares that same foundational principle of transparency. A platform cannot be decentralized if it is proprietary, as the organization that owns the software code ultimately becomes the central point of failure.” – Ben Golub, Storj Interim CEO and Executive Chairman

Tokenization:

A quadrillion dollar market is unfolding, driven by the emergence of security tokens. As currencies are tokenized, as bonds are tokenized, as equities are tokenized, as currencies and real estate and energy are tokenized — We are watching the birth of a quadrillion-dollar market. Also, Qualified Opportunity Zones (QOZs) are going to deliver over $100B of capital into places where economic stimulus is needed in the U.S. We are also going to see the first Dapps (decentralized applications) that hit a million users a day sometime next year. Because we’ve now had our “Netscape” moment, we now have scalable blockchains that have no friction (meaning anyone can access it without having tokens) low latency (meaning it’s fast and scalable and can be by many people) with EOS as the first general protocol with many to come. It’s the equivalent of when the first IPhone launched in the App Store.” – Brock Pierce, American Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation and co-founder of EOS Alliance

I think that the main trend will be securities tokens. The combination of the power of a distributed ledger with more standardized securities will open lots of doors in capital creation. Privacy will continue to be important. There will be an increasing gap between those with solid technology and those with weak, captive networks.” – Bruce Fenton, Founder and Managing Director of Atlantic Financial, Board member of the Bitcoin Foundation and co-founder of the Bitcoin Association

The ability to fractionalize illiquid assets will allow institutions to offer unique portfolio positioning that suit the preferences of the investor. Given the transparency involved in a correctly-designed token, there will be new ways to visualize risk and returns. This will unleash a new wave of investing that has been bottled up because of asymmetry of information. Ultimately, tokenization will greatly flatten that asymmetry, which is what this is all about.” – Sam Tabar, Fluidity Co-Founder

Venture Capital:

2019 is going to be another year of building. We’re squarely in the phase in which the crypto space is developing the companies, products, and infrastructure to support the wild valuations we saw in 2017. I expect we’ll see more consolidation, as both companies and funds struggle to raise capital. While this might sound gloomy, I think it’s actually quite healthy. As technology and valuations start to converge at rational levels again, the stage will be set for the industry to enter the next phase of maturity.” – Arianna Simpson, Venture Capitalist and Managing Director at Autonomous Partners

We should not forget that token issuers are startups and they have an even higher burn rate than that of traditional startups. With over $10 billion raised by those crypto startups in 2017-2018, the conversion to fiat currencies is inevitable. In addition, all the crypto services and talent have been twice as expensive as for traditional startups. Once billions of dollars are liquidated to pay bills, it is normal for the prices of the major crypto currencies to drop. This of course had a snowball effect: the panic starts and hundreds of entrepreneurs need to sell crypto to secure capital for product development. Even cryptofunds whose market capitalization is $10 billion tend to have focused on equity deals recently. They’ve liquidated part of their crypto portfolio and hold fiat. In addition, we shouldn’t forget that the main reason the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks exists are because of the miners. Miners had to sell as well to maintain their facilities. They’ve overmined Bitcoin in 2017, assuming the price would keep going up.” – Natalia Karayaneva, Propy CEO and Founder

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelwolfson/2018/12/20/blockchain-and-crypto-leaders-share-their-2019-industry-predictions/#486a7ad2155e

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, Bitcoin, Blockchain stocks, Canadian Blockchain Stocks, Smallcap Blockchain stocks | Comments Off on ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – #Blockchain And #Crypto Leaders Share Their 2019 Industry Predictions $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – Top 5 #blockchain predictions for 2019 $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 9:01 AM on Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital Inc. (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click Here For More Information.

Idk large
————-

– Decentralization of apps, not just of the ledger

– Off-chain components are important for enterprise class apps

– Recognizing the importance of non-technology issues

December 12, 2018 Emmanuel Thiriez

2018 has certainly been a year. As the days grow shorter, we can’t help but look forward to a brand new 2019 and all the amazing tech trends in store for us. Today. we’re kicking off a week of predictions for next year. First up: blockchain! Emmanuel Thiriez explains five of his predictions for distributed ledger tech for the new year.

Blockchain is an increasingly key technology for enterprises that require trustless transactions and secure record keeping. Enterprises can track transactions with greater confidence and security, and blockchain adoption – completely distinct from the cryptocurrency hype or doom – is steadily gaining in enterprise environments.

However, while the technical benefits of the blockchain technology are widely acknowledged, enterprises looking to make budget decisions and start test projects or full implementations should know where this technology is headed, what tools are needed and what challenges can be expected. I talked with Emmanuel Thiriez, founder of Amalto and Platform 6, with over 15 years of implementation and operation of enterprise applications for clients in various industries, to find out what someone “in the trenches” is seeing. Thiriez’s company has an impressive list of clients (Chevron, GE, Iron Mountain, Suez, Superior Propane, Thales) with B2B applications powered by Platform 6, a blockchain development platform.

Thiriez cautioned against overestimating the impact of blockchain in your organization “immediately,” but he is extremely bullish on the mid- and long-term prospects.

Overall, there’s every indication that enterprise adoption will continue to grow in 2019. According to Thiriez, the following 5 trends are key to blockchain success. He also brought up one highly visible blockchain project in 2019 to follow.

1. Decentralization of apps, not just of the ledger

Implementing blockchain to ensure the trustability and immutability of records is only part of the story. 2019 will see more decentralization of apps themselves. Too many applications using a blockchain ledger rely on a centralized application that represents a single point of failure and also a vulnerability that could allow tampering with the data – before it gets written to the ledger.

The same approach needs to be applied to the application’s logic, which must be decentralized with no single point of control. Each trading partner or member of the ecosystem runs their own app. Building such applications is no easy feat, but it is a required step to ensure wide blockchain adoption for business usage.

2. Off-chain components are important for enterprise class apps

Building enterprise apps is a complex project. Enterprise apps are often designed to operate in a global business or government environment, and need to display, manipulate, and store large amounts of complex data and to support automation of business processes with that data.

Applying blockchain technology is important. However, the blockchain ledger is only a small part of the overall enterprise app. Many off-chain components are also needed – user management, workflows, systems integration, user interface, APIs, security, event mediation, and many more.

In 2019, more and more only applications that are designed and architected beyond the blockchain ledger and its smart contracts will make the cut.

3. Recognizing the importance of non-technology issues

As is often the case with bleeding edge technologies, there are many non-technology issues to deal with. Ecosystem management, industry-specific practices, legal issues that have little to do with blockchain per se but everything to do with whether a blockchain implementation is successful or not.

This issue is highlighted by Forrester Principal analyst Martha Bennett, who states in her “Predictions 2019” blog post:

I often use the phrase, “blockchains are 80% business, 20% technology.” If anything, that 80% is on the low side, and we’ll continue to see projects held up or even fail because companies’ focus is on the 20%.

When implementing blockchain projects, companies that pay attention to these non-technology issues in 2019 will have greater success rates.

4. Blockchain and the Internet of Things

The convergence between blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) is picking up steam. IoT adoption is significantly increasing the number of devices and sensors that gather data, and many parties are typically involved in a business transaction based on that data.

Blockchain enables safe record-keeping through an immutable ledger, and permits decentralized operations and transactions while preserving trust between all players in the value chain. Look for the intersection of these two technologies to speed up implementation of both.

5. An evolving ecosystem

The blockchain ecosystem is continuing to evolve quickly. This past year saw the dominance of Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and R3’s Corda as the major platforms in blockchain. It is clear that new platforms will continue to emerge with different strengths, and this will mean popularity of platforms will rise and fall. Having the ability to develop for different platforms, prototyping new ones as needed, will be a strength for enterprises. In other words, when evaluating blockchain technologies, there will be no one-size-fits-all in 2019, and companies have to be prepared to jump from one technology to the other.

Major projects will raise visibility for blockchain

Several prominent blockchain projects in 2019 will influence interest in the technology. A key one to watch is Walmart. To better ensure food safety, Walmart and Sam’s Club are requiring produce suppliers to trace their products using blockchain technology.

Can Walmart and its suppliers make sure that all the different complicated steps from farm-to-table are accurately and safely completed? If blockchain delivers as promised, this will significantly raise visibility.

Suppliers still have some time for implementation but the system outlined by Walmart is scheduled to be in place by the end of 2019.

Summary

Blockchain is evolving rapidly. 2019 will see new projects and new platforms continue to emerge. A key trend is more decentralization of apps themselves. Currently, too many apps using a blockchain ledger rely on a centralized application. Understanding of this issue is increasing. In a similar vein, paying attention to off-chain components as a key part of your blockchain project and being flexible in evaluating your blockchain platform will continue to be key pieces of success in the coming year.     Source: https://jaxenter.com/top-5-blockchain-predictions-2019-152880.html

Tags: , ,
Posted in Canadian Blockchain Stocks, Smallcap Blockchain stocks, ThreeD, ThreeD Capital | Comments Off on ThreeD Capital Inc. $IDK.ca – Top 5 #blockchain predictions for 2019 $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Technologies of #Blockchain- Part 4: Conclusion

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 4:28 PM on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

By Dr. Kiran Garimella

In parts 1-3, we briefly touched on some of the historical foundations of blockchains from computer science and mathematics, including their sub-topics such as distributed systems and cryptography. Specific topics in either of these categories were consensus mechanisms, fault-tolerance, scaling, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.

Obviously, this brief series doesn’t do justice. The history of computing and mathematics is rich, with many interconnections and dependencies. The goal of this series was to provide just enough to make the point that the technologies that power blockchain (whether public or private) were built on a well-established foundation of various topics with contributions from real scientists in both industry and academia. The graphic below depicts the broad brush-strokes of development, clearly showing how current blockchain technologies are based on a wide spectrum of historical developments.

Technologies of Blockchain – Historical Timeline

Conclusion
As you can see, a tremendous amount of development that took place for almost half a century made the modern blockchain possible. Bringing these technologies together—almost all of them based not on just techniques but deep mathematical foundations—into a cohesive whole in the form of a bitcoin application was no doubt a tremendous achievement in itself.

Moving forward, we need to keep in mind the initial motivation for each of these technologies, their strengths, their limitations, and determine how to create different architectures based on business needs. A good example of this is to relax the requirements of anonymity, strengthen safety, incorporate recourse, improve security, and incorporate the enormous complexity of regulatory compliance in securities transactions. Making such trade-offs doesn’t detract from the need for public, decentralized blockchains. On the contrary, this strengthens the use of the blockchain technology ‘horizontally’ across many industries and use cases.

In the near future, we expect to see some innovation in blockchains to improve performance and scalability, which is a special challenge for public blockchains. Along the same lines, there will be new consensus mechanisms going mainstream (such as proof-of-stake). For consensus and validation, blockchain researchers are investigating efficient implementation of zero-knowledge proofs and specific variants such as zkSNARKs.

 

 

Tags: ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, KoreConX | Comments Off on Technologies of #Blockchain- Part 4: Conclusion

Technologies of #Blockchain Part 3: Cryptography, Scaling, and Consensus #KoreConx

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 4:19 PM on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Kiran Garimella

In Part 2, we saw how a simple concept of a linked list can morph into complex, distributed systems. Obviously, this is a simple, conceptual evolution leading up to blockchain, but it’s not the only way distributed systems can arise. Distributed systems need coordination, fault tolerance, consensus, and several layers of technology management (in the sense of systems and protocols).

Distributed systems also have a number of other complex issues. When the nodes in a distributed system are also decentralized (from the perspective of ownership and control), security becomes essential. That’s where complex cryptographic mechanisms come into play. The huge volume of transactions makes it necessary to address performance of any shared or replicated data, thus paving the way to notions of scaling, sharding, and verification of distributed data to ensure that it did not get out of sync or get compromised. In this segment, we will see that these ideas are not new; they were known and have been working on for several decades.

Cryptography

One important requirement in distributed systems is the security of data and participants. This motivates the introduction of cryptographic techniques. Ralph Merkle, for example, introduced in 1979 the concept of a binary tree of hashes (now known as a Merkle tree). Cryptographic hashing of blocks was implemented in 1991 by Stuart Haber & W. Scott Stornetta. In 1992, they incorporated Merkle trees into their scheme for efficiency.

The hashing functions are well-researched, standard techniques that provide the foundation for much of modern cryptography, including the well-known SSL certificates and the https protocol. Merkle’s hash function, now known as the Merkle-Damgard construction, is used in SHA-1 and SHA-2. Hashcash uses SHA-1 (original SHA-0 in 1993, SHA-1 in 1995), now using the more secure SHA-2 (which actually consists of SHA-256 and SHA-512). The more secure SHA-3 is the next upgrade.

Partitioning, Scaling, Replicating, and Sharding

Since the core of a blockchain is the database in the form of a distributed ledger, the question of how to deal with the rapidly growing size of the database becomes increasingly urgent. Partitioning, replicating, scaling, and sharding are all closely related concepts. These techniques, historically used in enterprise systems, are now being employed in blockchains to address performance limitations.

As with all things blockchain, these are not new concepts either, since large companies have been struggling with these issues for many decades, though not from a blockchain perspective. The intuitively obvious solution for a growing database is to split it up into pieces and store the pieces separately. Underlying this seemingly simple solution lies a number of technical challenges, such as how would the application layer know in which “piece” any particular data record would be found, how to manage queries across multiple partitions of the data, etc. While these scalability problems are tractable in enterprise systems or in ecosystems that have known and permitted participants (i.e., the equivalent of permissioned blockchains), it gets trickier in public blockchains. The permutations for malicious strategies seem endless and practically impossible to enumerate in advance. The need to preserve reasonable anonymity also increases the complexity of robust solutions.

Verification and Validation

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) are techniques to prove (to another party, called the verifier) that the prover knows something without the prover having to disclose what it is that the prover knows. (This sounds magical, but there are many simple examples to show how this is possible that I’ll cover in a later post.) ZKP was first described in a paper, “The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems” in 1985 by Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff (apparently, it was developed much earlier in 1982 but not published until 1985). Zcash, a bitcoin-based cryptocurrency, uses ZKPs (or variants called zkSNARKs, first introduced in 2012 by four researchers) to ensure validity of transactions without revealing any information about the sender, receiver, or the amount itself.

Some of these proofs and indeed the transactions themselves could be implemented by automated code, popularly known as smart contracts. These were first conceived by Nick Szabo in 1996. Despite the name, it is debatable if these automated pieces of code can be said to be smart given the relatively advanced current state of artificial intelligence. Similarly, smart contracts are not quite contracts in the legal sense. A credit card transaction, for example, incorporates a tremendous amount of computation that includes checking for balances, holds, fraud, unusual spending patterns, etc., with service-level agreements and contractual bindings between various parties in the complex web of modern financial transactions, but we don’t usually call this a ‘smart contract’. In comparison, even the current ‘smart contracts’ are fairly simplistic.

Read Part 1: The Foundations and Part 2: Distributed Systems

Source: https://www.koreconx.com/2018/11/28/technologies-blockchain-part-3-cryptography-scaling-consensus/

Tags: , , ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, KoreConX | Comments Off on Technologies of #Blockchain Part 3: Cryptography, Scaling, and Consensus #KoreConx

Technologies of #Blockchain – Part 2: Distributed Systems #KoreConX

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 4:11 PM on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Kiran Garimella

We saw in Part 1 that linked lists provide the conceptual foundation for blockchain, where a ‘block’ is a package of data and blocks are strung together by some type of linking mechanism such as pointers, references, addresses, etc. In this Part 2, we will see how this simple concept gives rise to powerful ideas that lay the foundation for distributed systems.

What happens when one of the links in the linked list or one of the computers (aka, ‘nodes’) in a distributed system falls sick (and responds slowly), gets taken down (‘hacked’), or dies? How does the full list (or chain) recover from such tragic events? This brings us to the notion of fault tolerance in distributed systems. Once changes are made to the data in one of the nodes (blocks), how do we ensure that the same information is consistent with other nodes? That introduces the requirement for consensus.

Pushing the analogy of the linked list a bit further, algorithms that manage linked lists are carefully designed not to break the list. Appending links to the end or the front, for that matter, is an easy operation (we just need to make sure that the markers that indicate the start and end of the list are updated correctly). However, removing a link (or member of the chain) or adding one is a bit trickier. When it is necessary to remove or insert into the middle of the list, it’s a bit more complicated, but a well-understood problem with known solutions. We won’t go into the specifics in this article because the intent is not to describe these operations but to convey a high-level historical perspective.

In distributed systems, fault tolerance becomes a very important topic. In one sense, it is a logical extension to managing a linked list on a single computer. Obviously, in real-world applications, each of the nodes in a distributed system are economic entities that depend on other economic entities to achieve their goals. Faults within the system must be minimized as much as possible. When faults are inevitable, recovery must be as quick and complete as possible. Computer scientists began studying the methods of fault tolerance in the mid-1950s, resulting in the first fault-tolerant computer, SAPO, in Czechoslovakia.

Besides fault tolerance, when information needs to be added to the distributed system (a bit like adding, deleting, or updating the elements of a linked list), the different parties must agree. The reason for agreement is that the data that goes into the ‘linked list’ is data that arises out of transactions between these parties. Without agreement, imagine the chaos! My node would record that I sent you $90 while your node would record only $19! Or, if I send you payment for a product, I expect to receive the product. There should be agreement, settlement, and reconciliation between the transacting parties. A stronger requirement in distributed systems is that once the parties agree to something, the data that is agreed upon cannot be changed by one of the parties without the concurrence of the other party or parties. The strongest version of this requirement is ‘immutability’, where it is technically impossible to make any changes to data that is agreed to and committed to the chain.

Fault-Tolerance and Consensus

Distributed systems, therefore, require fault-tolerance, consensus, and immutability in varying degrees, depending on the needs of the business. Mechanisms for fault-tolerance and consensus evolved since the early days. Notable developments are:

  • Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) by Lamport, Shostak, and Pease in 1982, to deal with situations where one or more of the nodes in the distributed system become faulty or malicious.
  • Proof-of-Work (POW), first described in 1993 and the term coined in 1999, which is a technique for providing economic disincentives for malicious attacks. A precursor idea of POW was proposed in 1992 by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, as a means to combatting junk mail—a problem that was already a significant nuisance way back in 1992!* Their solution was to require a sender to solve a computational problem that was easy enough for sending emails normally but becomes computationally expensive for sending massive amounts of junk emails.
  • Hashcash, a POW algorithm, was proposed by Adam Back in 1997. This was used as the basis of POW in bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, which brought awareness of POW to a much wider audience.
  • A high-performance version of BFT, called Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), by Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov, in 1999; and so on.
  • Paxos**, a family of consensus algorithms, has its roots in a 1988 work by Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer, and first published in 1998 (even though conceived several years earlier) by Leslie Lamport.
  • Raft consensus algorithm was developed by Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout. Published in 2014, it was designed to be a more understandable alternative to Paxos.

State machine replication (SMR) is a framework for fault-tolerance and consensus is a way to resolve conflicts or achieve agreement on the state values. SMR’s beginnings are in the early 1980s, with an influential paper by Leslie Lamport, “Using Time Instead of Timeout for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems” in 1984.

In Part 3, we will do a high-level review of mechanisms designed to keep distributed systems secure, consistent, and able to handle large volumes of transactions.

Read Part 1: The Foundations and Part 3: Cryptography, Scaling, and Consensus.

*Their paper, “Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail”, begins with a charming expression of exasperation: “Some time ago one of us returned from a brief vacation, only to find 241 messages in our reader.”

**No known relation to the blockchain company, Paxos.com

Source: https://www.koreconx.com/2018/11/20/technologies-blockchain-part-2-distributed-systems/

Tags: , , ,
Posted in KoreConX | Comments Off on Technologies of #Blockchain – Part 2: Distributed Systems #KoreConX

Technologies of #Blockchain – Part 1: The Foundations #KoreConX

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 4:03 PM on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Kiran Garimella

Technologies of Blockchain – Part 1: The Foundations

Blockchain is not just a single technology but a package of a number of technologies and techniques. The rich lexicon in the blockchain includes terms such as Merkle trees, sharding, state machine replication, fault tolerance, cryptographic hashing, zero-knowledge proofs, zkSNARKS, and other exotic terms.

In this four-part series, we will provide a very high-level overview of each of the main components of technology. In reality, the number of technologies, variations, configurations, and considerations of trade-offs are numerous. Each piece in this puzzle was motivated by certain business requirements and technical considerations.

In this first part, we look at the origins of the ‘chain’ and the most important technological advancement that makes blockchain (and all e-commerce) possible, i.e., the Internet.

While there have been genuine innovations within the last decade, blockchain’s underlying technologies are mostly quite old (in computer science time scale). Let us unpack a typical blockchain to trace out the origins of the constituent technologies. In this short post, I’ll only point to a very small (some may say, infinitesimally small) subset of the historical origin of technologies that make the modern blockchain possible. I’ll make no attempt to trace the development of these concepts from origin to the present time (that would fill up several books). The fact that blockchain’s technologies have a long and respectable history should help us gain confidence that blockchain, as a technology, is not some fly-by-night, newfangled idea cooked up by the crypto fandom.

What is less certain and much more controversial is the economic justification for blockchain (or at least some types of blockchain), ranging from the unrealistic expectation that it is a panacea for all of humankind’s ills (most optimistically, for social and economic inequities), to the total and premature dismissal of blockchain in its entirety.

The Beginnings

At the conceptual heart of blockchain is the ‘chain’. By definition, the links of the chain are, well, linked. It’s a list of data elements or packets of information (in blockchain, these are called ‘blocks’) that are linked. A blockchain is, therefore, a type of linked list.

The concept of a linked list was defined by pioneers of computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon, way back in 1955-56.

In the early days of computer science, data and processing power lived on individual computers. Soon, people wanted these computers to ‘talk’ to each other. The grand idea of an Intergalactic Computer Network was put forth by J. C. R. Licklider as early as 1963. Unfortunately, even after half a century of rapid development, we have achieved only a planetary-wide Internet so far. An ‘intergalactic’ network is still a few years away!*

These ideas and the need to connect dispersed computers gave rise to wide-scale distributed systems in the 1960s-70s, with the advent of ARPANET and Ethernet. Technically, these linked computers are not necessarily treated in the same way as a traditional linked list that lived on one computer, but the conceptual idea is similar. When data and computational power get dispersed, layers of management, coordination, and security become increasingly important.

Blockchain would not exist without the Internet, which itself would not exist without TCP/IP, developed by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in the 1970s and ‘80s. Along the way, some scientists managed to have some fun too. They carried out an April Fools prank in 1990 by issuing an RFC (1149) for IPoAC protocol (IP over Avian Carriers, i.e., carrier pigeons). The punch line was delivered in April 2001 when a Linux user group implemented CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol) by sending nine data packets over three miles using carrier pigeons. They reported packet loss of 55%. A joke that takes a decade to pull off is practically Saturday night live comedy in Internet time scale!

In part 2, we will see how the extension of the concept of linked list on the Internet leads to distributed systems, the attending challenges, and their solutions.

Source: https://www.koreconx.com/2018/11/14/technologies-blockchain-part-1-foundations/

Tags: , ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, KoreConX | Comments Off on Technologies of #Blockchain – Part 1: The Foundations #KoreConX

ThreeD Capital $IDK.ca – Report: Blockchain Deployment Could Add $3 Trillion in International Trade by 2030 $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 4:41 PM on Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

SPONSOR: ThreeD Capital (IDK:CSE) Led by legendary financier, Sheldon Inwentash, ThreeD Capital is a Canadian-based venture capital firm that only invests in best of breed small-cap companies which are both defensible and mass scalable. More than just lip service, Inwentash has financed many of Canada’s biggest small-cap exits. Click here for more information

Idk large

  • The World Trade Organization (WTO) released a report on blockchain technology’s effect on international trade today, Nov. 27.
  • Per the study, blockchain’s economic value-add on a global scale could reach almost $3 trillion by 2030.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) released a report on blockchain technology’s effect on international trade today, Nov. 27. Per the study, blockchain’s economic value-add on a global scale could reach almost $3 trillion by 2030.

“Blockchain and International Trade: Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications for International Trade Cooperation” analyzes blockchain applications and challenges that must be considered before the technology’s deployment in various sectors. The study considers the technology’s effect on industries such as trade finance, customs clearance, logistics and transportation.

Blockchain Business Value Forecast. Source: WTO

The study estimates that blockchain has the potential to significantly cut trade costs by increasing transparency and facilitating processes automation, including financial intermediation, exchange rate costs, coordination, and other aspects. “The removal of barriers due to blockchain could result in more than $ 1 trillion of new trade in the next decade,” the report reads.

Blockchain is expected to help administer intellectual property rights across multiple jurisdictions by delivering more transparency and efficiency, and enhance government procurement processes, including fighting fraud and managing public contracts.

Blockchain purportedly could improve supply chains, allowing for the tracking of shipments and proving their authenticity. Additionally, the technology could open new opportunities to micro, small and medium-sized companies.

Conversely, the study warns about challenges that must be addressed before deploying blockchain, as well as its impact on international trade. The researchers point out limited scalability of blockchains due to the predetermined size of blocks, in addition to energy consumption and security issues.

Although “blockchains are highly resilient compared to traditional databases due to their decentralized and distributed nature and the use of cryptographic techniques, they are not completely immune from traditional security challenges,” the study states.

The report stresses the importance of developing a multi-stakeholder approach in order to find appropriate use cases in cross-border trade. According to the WTO, blockchain requires frameworks that ensure the interoperability of networks and provide clear legal status for blockchain transactions across jurisdictions. The report concludes:

“Blockchain could make international trade smarter, but smart trade requires smart standardization — and smart standardization can only happen through cooperation. If we succeed in creating an ecosystem conducive to the wider development of blockchain, international trade could well look radically different in ten to 15 years.”

Earlier this week, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin said that the misapplication of blockchain technology in some industries leads to “wasted time.” Buterin argued that although there are a number of companies that try to establish higher standards by using blockchain technology, he does not think the technology is applicable in every industry.

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-blockchain-deployment-could-add-3-trillion-in-international-trade-by-2030

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, Blockchain stocks, Blockstation, Canadian Blockchain Stocks, Smallcap Blockchain stocks | Comments Off on ThreeD Capital $IDK.ca – Report: Blockchain Deployment Could Add $3 Trillion in International Trade by 2030 $HIVE.ca $BLOC.ca $CODE.ca

Good Life Networks $GOOD.ca – IP and the Blockchain revolution $TTD $RUBI $AT.ca $TRMR $FUEL

Posted by AGORACOM-JC at 10:41 AM on Friday, November 23rd, 2018

Sponsor: Good Life Networks $GOOD.ca Video advertising is the future! Company’s A.I. makes 80,000 calculations / second, targeting 750 million users to deliver higher prices and volume. The company achieved a record $9.7 Million in revenue for 2017 and recently announced entering the video game industry with programmatic technology. Click here for more information.

Glnlogo black 11

IP and the Blockchain revolution

 

A revolution that turns the fickle Internet of information into a secure Internet of value is upon us — and it’s made in Canada

  • A blockchain is a peer-to-peer transactional network for anything of value, whether stocks, money, music, diamonds, carbon credits, or even intellectual property
  • Rather than a single intermediary like a bank or government keeping records in a proprietary ledger, a distributed network of computers works to verify transactions, with the results recorded in a shared ledger that anyone in the network can access and no single entity can hack.

November 21, 2018
2:25 PM EST

Alex Tapscott

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The FP set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. Over the next three months, we’ll talk to some of the innovators, visionaries and scientists on the cutting edge of the new cutthroat economy about a blueprint for Canadian success. You can find all of our coverage here

Back in March, amid threats of tariffs, the Trump administration put Canada on its 2018 “Priority Watch List” of trading partners with “the most onerous or egregious acts, policies, or practices” around intellectual property rights. Among U.S. grievances were allegations of ineffective policing of online piracy and inaction against digital pirates. But this blustery rhetoric misses the point: Canada’s IP policies and practices are not the problem.

The real problem is the technology itself. The Internet renders stronger laws and government enforcement insufficient and ultimately futile. The first era of the Internet — the Internet of information — effectively broke the IP property regime because it made copying digital assets easy. Consider music: Once real assets delivered on a physical medium like a compact disc or vinyl record, songs have been run through the Internet’s copier until their marginal value neared zero. Labels lost money, artists lost their livelihoods.

Yes, the Internet is a powerful tool that has transformed how we share and access information and how we communicate. But it’s also the ultimate bootleg press, peep hole on all things private and costume closet for identity thieves. The upshot  is that now the only artists consistently making money are the con artists.

Fortunately, rather than yet another regulation or tougher prosecution — which become barriers to entry for individual artists, inventors and start-ups — there is now a better deterrent to counterfeiting, fraud and IP theft: it is the blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

A blockchain is a peer-to-peer transactional network for anything of value, whether stocks, money, music, diamonds, carbon credits, or even intellectual property. Rather than a single intermediary like a bank or government keeping records in a proprietary ledger, a distributed network of computers works to verify transactions, with the results recorded in a shared ledger that anyone in the network can access and no single entity can hack.

Bitcoin was the first breakthrough. It demonstrated the creation and preservation of digital scarcity through cryptography and clever code, transforming a highly fickle Internet of information into a secure and permanent Internet of value.

But cryptocurrencies were just the beginning. Not only can we record and verify clear ownership of IP rights, we can use smart contracts — software that mimics the logic of a business agreement, incentivizes performance, and executes deal terms — to activate these rights and maximize their value, all the while complying with regulations and enforcing trade agreements.

There are implications for core Canadian industries, such as manufacturing, technology and medicine that rely on patents and industrial designs; mining and agriculture benefiting from geographical indicators; and music and film depending on copyright.

Patents and product design

Consider how the company Moog leverages its industrial designs on a blockchain. Based in New York, Moog is an aircraft precision part manufacturer operating in a highly regulated industry. It counts the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin among its customers. Any counterfeits in its products, inefficiencies in its supply chain, or violations of IP rights can delay missions, compromise critical systems and endanger lives. So Moog has worked with a Canadian technology platform, the Aion Foundation, to create a blockchain that reduces complexity and increases the integrity of its supply chain by tracking and recording every action of its partners. Moog has also placed such intangible assets as design files and licences in smart contracts: for each download of a design file, the IP rights holder instantly receives a royalty. These transactions are timestamped on the shared ledger, making IP audits easier. Similar systems would benefit Canada’s industrial and manufacturing sectors as well as its digital companies.

Provenance and geographical indicators

The Kimberley Process has reduced the trade of blood diamonds by requiring diamond-mining countries to certify that their exports are conflict-free. However, the largely paper-based certification process is rife with corruption, forgeries and inefficiencies, so that compromised diamonds continue to enter the supply chain. To close the gap, a London-based company called Everledger is using blockchain and other emerging technologies to create a global digital ledger for diamonds. Producers, consumers, insurers and regulators can use this shared ledger to track the flow of individual diamonds through the supply chain, from the mines to jewellers. Incorporating blockchain into the diamond supply chain also minimizes insurance fraud. The value of verifying authenticity, provenance and custody through blockchain obviously holds for a wide range of items — from Canadian rye whiskey to paintings.

Copyright

Anyone who follows the music industry knows of the tussles between artists and those who rely on their creative output. The traditional food chain is a long one. Between those who create the music and those who pay for it are online retailers (Apple), streaming audio (Spotify), video services (YouTube), concert venues, merchandisers, tour promoters (Live Nation), performance rights organizations (PRS, PPL, ASCAP, BMI), the labels (Sony, Universal, Warner), music producers, recording studios and talent agencies, each with its own contract and accounting system. Each takes a cut of the revenues and passes along the rest, the leftovers reaching the artists themselves six to 18 months later per the terms of their contracts. Before the Internet, a songwriter might earn US$45,000 in royalties for a song that sold a million copies. Now that songwriter might earn only US$35 for a million streams.

Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin in Toronto. Some of the world’s most successful blockchain projects — Ethereum, Aion, and Cosmos, to name a few — were started in Canada. J.P. Moczulski for National PostImagine instead a world where artists decide how they’d like their music to be shared or experienced — simply by uploading a verified, searchable piece of music and all its related content online. Through the triggering of smart contracts, a song could become its own business, collecting royalties and allocating them to the digital wallets of rights owners such as songwriters and studio musicians. Artists and other creators would get paid first and fairly, rather than last and least.

Soon it will be possible to manage, store and exchange any digital asset using this technology — from patents to carbon credits to our personal health data.

Even better, blockchain is a made-in-Canada story. Some of the world’s most successful blockchain projects — Ethereum, Aion, and Cosmos, to name a few — were started here. Canada’s culture of innovation, openness and entrepreneurship allowed them to flourish. Now we can harness this technology to strengthen other industries and ensure that Canada’s intellectual capital is not only protected but allowed to thrive.

Alex Tapscott is the co-founder of the Blockchain research Institute and co-author of Blockchain Revolution, now translated into 15 languages. He is also an active investor in blockchain companies and projects.

Source: https://business.financialpost.com/technology/in-the-blockchain-economy-intellectual-property-will-be-obsolete

 

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in All Recent Posts, Featured, Good Life Networks | Comments Off on Good Life Networks $GOOD.ca – IP and the Blockchain revolution $TTD $RUBI $AT.ca $TRMR $FUEL

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »