Tag: blockchain

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Self-Learning and Self-Starting in the Blockchain Industry

In this brief video by Udacity, Marie Leaf describes herself as a lifelong learner. Leaf built a unique career path that led her to a position in the blockchain industry. She describes how she leverage self-education and her self-starter mindset to pursue the technology-centric career she desired.

Udacity provides online education courses and offers nanodegree programs such as blockchain developer, front-end and senior web developer, full stack web developer, data analyst, machine learning engineer, iOS and Android developer, programming introduction, tech entrepreneur, iOS app development beginning, Ruby beginning, and 2D mobile game developer courses.

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Blockchain Letter-of-Credit Demo

https://youtu.be/37WaD4iEHCI

IBM posted this short video to demonstrate a simple example of real-world blockchain application.

In this example, blockchain provides a small business faster access to credit.  More specifically, what is demonstrated is how blockchain facilitates a small business purchase of a number of computers from an oversea supplier via a letter-of-credit from a bank.  Blockchain facilitates the transaction by making available pertinent information as a transparent and trusted data chain so that all parties can readily identify details to ship the computers and transact payment.

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What is Delegated Proof of Stake?

blockchain technology

Fundamental to different blockchain projects is the manner in which transactions are verified, or more technically speaking, how a “consensus” is achieved to ensure blockchain integrity.

Different consensus algorithms have evolved – and are still evolving – to support efficient blockchain scaling.

To better understand Delegated Proof of Stake, it’s best to grasp what it is intending to improve.

PROOF OF WORK

Proof of Work has been a fundamental consensus solution, which relies upon a network of “miners” to solve a cryptographic puzzle to form network consensus and by that receive compensation for their efforts. However, this method is energy inefficient, restricted in its potential scalability and is vulnerable to undue influence by limited entities, which is antithetical to the decentralized intention of blockchain.

PROOF OF STAKE

Proof of Stake evolved to solve the shortcomings inherent with Proof of Work. It is faster, more scaleable and consumes far less energy. It also doesn’t require special hardware, which further contributes to the intention for a democratization and decentralization of blockhain.

Instead of using miners, Proof of Stake reaches consensus by way of “validators” who stake a certain amount of their earnings to support the system in exchange for rewards. In this case, validators seek to be rewarded for their efforts as in Proof of Work, but the opportunity to achieve that compensation is more decentralized by virtue of the system randomly selecting validators for their support. However, validators can gain greater influence by way of wealth.

Hence, Proof of Stake has evolved to various flavors, and a common variant is called Delegated Proof-of-Stake.

DELEGATED PROOF OF STAKE

Delegated Proof-of-Stake builds upon the original Proof of Stake consensus mechanism and further increases speed and scalability.

Delegated proof of stake uses real-time voting combined with a social system of reputation to achieve consensus. It can be seen as the least centralized consensus protocol compared.

Daniel Larimer invented Delegated Proof of Stake to establish a consensus system that was much faster, used little energy and was more secure via greater decentralization. In this system, community participants (owners of the pertinent cryptocurrency) vote for Witnesses and Delegates to secure and validate their blockchain network.

Witnesses are those who actually do the work of validating the network and reaching consensus and the top witnesses are paid the most.

Due to the remuneration opportunity, there are many who desire to be Witnesses, as well as backup witnesses. Voting is a continuous process and each witness in the top tier is always at risk of being replaced by a user who gets more votes and is therefore considered more trusted.

Users in Delegated Proof of Stake systems also vote for a group of Delegates who oversee the governance and performance of the entire blockchain protocol, but do not play a role in transaction validation and block production.

A drawback of Delegated Proof of Stake is the potential for voter apathy, which, like a political system, could then evolve power into a more centralized system.

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Cardano Foundation Changes

In a November 13th press release, The Cardano Foundation “announced that Michael Parsons, Chairman of the Foundation Council of the Cardano Foundation, has resigned with immediate effect. Pascal Schmid, Council Member, will take over as Chairman of the Foundation Council on an interim basis. “

In the above video, Charles Hoskinson discusses the change and expresses that the Cardano Foundation needs to spend the next few months re-establishing itself.

Hoskinson outlined three things he believes needs to be done.

  1. The foundation needs to restore credibility and trust with the community
  2. The foundation needs to be a good citizen and invest in its Swiss jurisdiction
  3. The foundation can reinvent itself from this crisis to become more effective for the community.

Additionally, Hopkinson outlined his personal wish list and outlook for the future.

In this article, the relationship between The Cardano Foundation and its counterparts are outlined. 

  • IOHK — Responsible for developing the core protocols that compose Cardano while meeting established academic and scientific standards.
  • Emurgo — Builds global relationships with developers and instigates projects for Cardano.
  • The Cardano Foundation — Created to promote Cardano while managing, informing, and responding to the needs of their growing international community.

In brief,  each of the three separate legal entities serve as a system of checks and balances, designed to prevent the failure of one branch from taking down the entire project

Additional details are available in this article: Cardano Foundation Says Goodbye To Its Chairman.


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Moving En Masse to Blockchain

Elixxir’s David Chaum and Madeira Global’s Christina Alfonso-Ercan speak with Fortune’s Robert Hackett at Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, earlier this month (Nov 5-8).

Chaum believes blockchain’s potential will surpass the hype and will unleash more human creativity and establish a new digital world.

He remarks that Bitcoin did not evolve into the vision delineated in Satoshi’s original white paper.

Alfonso-Ercan sees the opportunity for crypto as a convenience to human culture’s desire for instant gratification. Banks are going to be resistant to the change until it makes financial sense.

Chaum considers security to be the primary factor for big adoption. 

He elaborates that Blockchain is the next logical step and evolution for information technology. It will be the fundamental architecture for the democratization for entrepreneurs any where in the world. He also talks about his recent breakthroughwith Elixxir, which solves blockchain’s primary challenges.

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Does Your Biz Need Blockchain?

Mustafa Inamullah wrote 4 Questions Your Company Should Ask Before Pursuing Blockchain Technology, accompanied with an infographic.

He outlines points related to requirements for data security, network speed and cost.

An additional note worth emphasizing for many businesses is that the costs will come down.  In fact, it’s likely that the majority of businesses will use blockchain-as-a-service solutions that will be relatively simple to deploy (compared to today).

Think of the relative ease of which website deployments exist today, compared to the 90’s.  And of course the costs are a fraction of what they used to be.

Blockchain will likely follow a similar trajectory.

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Good Dollar Experiment

As noted on their website, “The GoodDollar experiment is a series of tests with the ultimate purpose of reducing wealth inequality through blockchain technology. Our mission is to build a new, global, open-source cryptocurrency – called GoodDollar – to distribute money using the principles of universal basic income (UBI).”

“GoodDollar, a 100% not-for-profit project, is nurturing an ecosystem – including academics, NGOs, ethical investors, crypto supporters, and anyone who cares about reducing inequality.”

The “GoodDollar” experiment was started by eToro and the firm has contributed $1 million to it as it seeks further contributions for the project.

The initiative calls for stakeholders who desire an end to inequality.

The GoodDollar home page highlights that 42 of the world’s richest people have more combined wealth than the poorest 3.7 billion.


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Analyzing Blockchain Investment Opportunities

Kate Rooney outlines three public companies that could benefit long-term from emerging blockchain tech and have nothing to do with bitcoin. Strategically speaking, the article identifies three ways to value blockchain opportunities.

  1. For those familiar with blockchain, the obvious strategy is to seek entities where the opportunity to replace a middleman is the largest.
  2. There is also the central idea of finding businesses where trust is needed or where none exists.
  3. And what may be the most obvious, exploring which companies are best positioned to offer blockchain as a service.

The first two are fundamental benefits of blockchain, in addition to improved transparency and lowered transaction costs.

The third is already in play with IBM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft (and others), all positioning themselves early to be front and center of the anticipated wave of companies that will be embracing blockchain as the technology becomes more readily deployable and the economic opportunities become irresistible.

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Arguments Against Blockchain Regulation

blockchain

Jonathan Johnson, President of Medici Ventures, notes arguments against blockchain regulation in his article, Three Challenges Facing Blockchain.

Blockchain is in a nascent era of finding itself. Like a kid learning to walk.  Such a young child innately knows it’s going to grow much bigger.  But in the mean time, there’s a lot of growing to do.

Johnson states:

Technology — and the advancement of blockchain — should not be regulated. In the 1990s, when the internet’s potential was becoming evident, legislators opted not to regulate it. That bipartisan decision led to the open-market creation of the much-lauded ‘information superhighway’ and the power of the internet today.

Certainly, there will be use cases that may require regulation as blockchain applications develop and proliferate. But the growth of blockchain technology will be best nurtured when it is free and unfettered from regulation.

Johnson also makes the point that “We’ll know blockchain technology has become mainstream when we are no longer talking about it.”

That won’t be anytime soon.

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David Chaum on Elixxir

Elixxir’s David Chaum speaks with TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher at Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, earlier this month (Nov 5-8).

Chaum states that no current blockchains are ready for mainstream adoption because none can fully satisfy the following requirements:

  • Speed
  • Privacy
  • Security
  • Scale

Chaum is the CEO of Elixxir, which he founded this year as a blockchain solution to the above.  In brief, it enables fast, secure and confidential messaging and payments at minimal cost. The Elixxir blockchain can scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions each second, each message or payment delivered or confirmed within seconds, efficiently enabling use as a smartphone app.

He notes that blockchain established a fair playing field for anyone in the world.

The future will evolve in a way where developers will move from creating apps to dapps because they will make more money and it’s where the world will be going.

According to Elixxir’s website, “Two fundamental innovations have enabled Elixxir’s ability to scale performance and privacy securely:”

  • Nodes are selected to work together by a decentralized randomized algorithm. This creates increased privacy and network integrity.
  • All per-transaction public key operations are pre-computed; only “hash functions” are used in real-time per-transaction.

David Chaum is a serial entrepreneur who first created blockchain technology in 1982 while a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley.

David is widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash, is a renowned expert in cryptography and secure election systems, and today is a leading proponent of blockchain technology.

David also founded the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the cryptography group at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, DigiCash (issuer of eCash cyberbucks and fiat-backed digital currencies in the 90’s), and the Voting Systems Institute.

Here is David’s website: www.chaum.com.

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