Blockchain Technology

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panduranghari
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Blockchain Technology

Post by panduranghari »

Blockchain technology is the next big thing. What internet did, Blockchain will take it further.

The following article is an excellent primer. Like dharma preaches equality and equanimity, Blockchain technology will remove the world from the straight jacket imposed on it by vested interests through artificial regulations.

The reach of this technology break through is limitless. While everyone talks about Blockchain and crypto currency is the same breath, there is much more to it than just crypto currencies. There are about 600 crypto currencies like Bitcoin, X cash, ethereum etc.

We have many technology experts on here who might know more about block chain technology than I do. But the important thing is, Blockchain is not restricted to technologists. It's reach is limitless.


For eg. The technology would turn a company into a seamless network of coordinated freelancers.

Is your company on Blockchain

You don’t have to be an expert on digital currencies like bitcoin to be intrigued by the potential of the technology underlying them. Blockchain, as it’s called, is something new in computing. It mashes up cryptography and peer-to-peer networking to create what amounts to a shared database of transactions and other information—which can be open to all, controlled by no one. It’s not just for securely recording payments in crypto-coinage; a blockchain can handle complex transactions, even entire contracts. True believers say blockchain could reduce the need for businesses to organize as companies, which get work done via command and control. Using blockchain, they say, collaborators will be able to work together as free agents instead of under a hierarchy of bosses.

“Imagine for a moment if people could coordinate themselves in a much more organic and distributed manner, just like ants. But without giving up on the complexity and the free will that is characteristic of human societies. We can do that,” blockchain researcher Primavera De Filippi said in a TEDxCambridge talk last year.

The poetic vision of a blockchain society is a flock of starlings at dusk: decentralized yet perfectly coordinated. Blockchainers like to show video clips of murmurations—those enormous clouds of birds that pivot and wheel, climb and dive, split and merge with amazing grace. Blockchain, in this vision, could replace gobs of bankers, accountants, and lawyers, as well as escrow accounts, insurance, and everything else that society invented pre-21st century to verify payments and the performance of contracts.

Can blockchain really change companies as we know them? There are plenty of technical issues, such as how to reduce the system’s consumption of electricity. The biggest challenge, though, is likely the human element. People aren’t eusocial creatures like ants or termites. They like their freedom. The blockchain community needs to find a way to liberate people from corporate hierarchies without subjecting them to a new master, the blockchain itself.
It might seem premature to ponder how blockchain could change the world. When it makes the headlines these days, it’s generally because of a hack or a standards dispute, like the internecine warfare over how to speed up its rate of transaction-processing. But blockchain technology is not to be ignored or underestimated. You don’t want to be this decade’s version of Bryant Gumbel on Today in 1994: “What is internet, anyway?” he asked. “What is it? You write to it like mail?”


A blockchain, as the name suggests, is nothing more than an ever-lengthening chain of blocks of data. Each block contains a compact record of things that have happened. How it does this is interesting and complicated. The important point is that if something is recorded in a blockchain, it’s deemed by users to be true with a capital T. “Blockchain converges on a single reality. This is the greatness of blockchain, only this,” says Matan Field, an Israeli mathematical physicist who is chief executive officer of a blockchain startup called Backfeed. (De Filippi is Backfeed’s “chief alchemist.”)

Blockchain’s design prevents the owner of a currency token from committing fraud by spending it twice. The first spend is recorded for all to see, so no one would ever accept a second spend.

Gobs of accountants, bankers, lawyers, and company bureaucrats would vanish
The truth-telling feature of blockchain makes it enormously useful to banks, which have been among the first to start testing it. Microsoft launched blockchain as a service last year. Smaller companies are building dozens of apps on blockchain, such as one for musicians to track and collect royalties on their works.

According to CoinDesk, an online publisher, a couple in Singapore recorded their prenup on a blockchain, specifying that “every 10 days, 100 minutes must be spent on a date night, that shopping sprees shall be limited to once per fortnight ‘unless it’s for food,’ and that [Sayalee] Kaluskar must agree to watch The Walking Dead after [Gaurang] Torvekar finishes watching every season of Seinfeld.”

Nasdaq, an early adopter of blockchain, is using the technology to allow private companies to issue stock and stockholders of public companies to vote their shares. Everledger is using it to create a registry of diamonds to suppress trade in “blood diamonds” from conflict zones.

Some ideas for blockchain are a little scary. Toyota Financial Services has toyed with using a blockchain contract in which “if a finance payment isn’t made, the smart contract automatically transfers ownership and doesn’t let the owner use the car anymore. The car wouldn’t turn on,” says Chris Ballinger, the unit’s chief financial officer and global chief officer for strategic innovation. “People would do this voluntarily, because they can then finance at a lower rate.”

A no-excuses, stiff-consequences contract that’s permanently embedded in software is appealing to some people and appalling to others. “In a weird way I think blockchain unifies a lot of different political ideologies,” says Joseph Lubin, a co-founder of the advanced blockchain Ethereum and founder of Consensus Systems in Brooklyn, N.Y., which uses it. “It could map onto socialist or libertarian.”

Blockchain Backers Gather to Advance Governance
After streamlining companies, the next step for blockchain will be blowing them up. Ethereum, for one, goes beyond the ledger function to work more like Google Docs—shared software that can be used by all but is tamperproof. You can safely do business with someone you don’t know, because terms are spelled out in a “smart contract” embedded in the blockchain. There could be blockchain versions of Uber and Airbnb that are peer-to-peer: No company would need to sit in the middle of the transaction to gather data about your spending habits or collect a fee.

In 1937 economist Ronald Coase theorized in “The Nature of the Firm” that companies exist because markets can’t do everything efficiently; some jobs are easier to do in-house. For instance, it’s more convenient to hire staff than to contract with freelancers every time you need some work done. Firms will grow, Coase said, until they get so big that the cost of doing a transaction inside the company becomes higher than that of doing it on an arm’s-length basis.

The internet modified Coase’s equation by reducing the costs of searching for resources outside the firm and contracting and coordinating with outside parties. Take autos, where vertical integration is passé: Fewer than half of autoworkers are employed by the likes of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. More work for their suppliers, suppliers to those suppliers, and so on, down to makers of nuts, bolts, and wiper blades.

Blockchain will further the trend by adding the key element of trustworthiness, allowing companies to pare down staffs and functions to an essential core, write tech authors Don Tapscott and his son Alex Tapscott in the book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World.

“Imagine designing a system where it was very clear what the obligations of all the different parties are, and it was built into code. You would always do the right thing,” the elder Tapscott says. A philosopher might argue that there’s no virtue in doing the right thing simply because you’re prevented by software from doing the wrong thing. On the other hand, Tapscott asks, what successful economic system ever depended entirely on honor?
Even after blockchains catch on, some people will probably still be wage slaves, working for a W-2 and doing whatever the boss asks. But to some visionaries, the logical endpoint is a third stage in which entire companies move onto the blockchain and even the functions of the CEO and the board of directors are reduced to contracts rendered in computer code. Shareholders, through online voting, would make any decisions that aren’t programmed in. “One of the many advantages of having a robot run your organization is that it is immune to any outside influence, as it’s guaranteed to execute only what it was programmed to,” says Ethereum’s website.

A group of blockchain enthusiasts attempted a leap into this brave new world earlier this year by raising $150 million for a “decentralized autonomous organization,” running on Ethereum, that was chartered to be a leaderless venture capital fund. An anonymous hacker found a way to divert crypto-currency now valued at $40 million from the DAO without technically violating its rules. That created an embarrassing dilemma for the blockchain community: Stick to the letter of the contract and reward the hacker by letting the diversion of funds go ahead, or alter the supposedly inalterable record to recapture the money. In July participants in Ethereum chose the latter of those two evils. They rewound the blockchain to how it was before the hack, thus capturing the funds. Some members rejected the rewind, so now there are two versions of Ethereum going.
“If we don’t address governance, then the movement could collapse on itself”

Some people in the community of enthusiasts said after the DAO crackup that a fully blockchained world is still a good idea, albeit one whose time hasn’t yet come. “Each individual project will go through extensive review and a ‘training wheels’ phase with some centralized control before being fully let into the wild,” Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, wrote in an e-mail. Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin, writes in an e-mail that “blockchain contracts can be democratically upgraded and modified,” though provisions for doing so increase complexity and may jeopardize security. Modifications are simpler on a closed blockchain that involves just a handful of parties.

Others argue that it will never be possible to reduce the complex, fast-changing world of business to rules embedded in software. “It’s a fabulous technology. But in practice it is a system that is very elitist,” controlled by those who build the new virtual machines and understand their inner workings, says Marcella Atzori, a political analyst at the University College of London Research Centre for Blockchain Technologies. “Machines are not God,” she says. “We are the gods. We have to take control and change things.”

The problem when Atzori says “we” is that she doesn’t necessarily mean the same people that Buterin talks about. There really is no we; blockchain has never had an official governing body. That’s getting to be more of a problem as it grows from experiment to infrastructure. “If we don’t address governance, then the movement could collapse on itself as it disintegrates into warring factions,” the Tapscotts write in Blockchain Revolution.
The Tapscotts are trying to gin up a solution. They invited a dozen or so blockchain leaders, including one with ties to IBM and JPMorgan Chase, to their family’s summer compound in Lake of Bays, Ontario, from Aug. 24 to 26. “I don’t know what will come of it,” Don Tapscott said before the conclave. “At a minimum, a small group of people will have a common framework to talk about things.”

That would be a step in the right direction. Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, in a speech in Sydney last December, warned against the “geek sneer” pose that software is purer than and superior to law and regulation. Blockchain, in other words, can’t float free from society. “There’s a greater realization that some kind of governance is unavoidable,” says Fredrik Voss, vice president and head of blockchain innovation at Nasdaq.
It would be nice to invent a system that combined the security of blockchain with the freewheeling nature of the internet. That, sadly, is impossible. Blockchain achieves its security by creating a unified record of reality: who paid how much when, for example, or who performed what task for whom. It acts like a single computer that keeps updating its internal picture of the state of the world. That makes it a “state machine,” in computer-science terminology. A lot of time and energy—including physical energy, i.e. electricity—goes into maintaining this unified picture.

The internet, in contrast, is “stateless.” Computers on the internet don’t share an understanding of the state of the world. On the web, no one knows if you’re a dog or a god. It’s supremely open and flexible. The downside is that if one computer says you’ve paid for something and another says you still owe money, there’s no procedure on the net itself for deciding which is right. For that you need a blockchain.

Compared with the internet, blockchain is a ball and chain. Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison, though: What matters is that blockchain is far less cumbersome than the trust-creating infrastructure that it partially replaces. “Our existing governance and business processes were designed for a centralized age,” Lawrence Lundy, head of research and partnerships at Outlier Ventures, which develops blockchain companies, wrote in an e-mail. He’s optimistic that blockchain and related technologies “will combine over the next 10 years to redefine every single function within an organization and ultimately the very structure of a corporation.” Melanie Swan, a bitcoin expert at New York’s New School for Social Research, envisions blockchains enabling what Belgian management consultant Frederic Laloux calls “Teal Organizations,” which are self-managing and purposeful.
So blockchain really can change companies as we know them. People will still be people, though. Blockchain or not, we will never operate in perfect synchrony, just as the Navy’s formation-flying Blue Angels will never equal a murmuration of starlings at dusk.
Yagnasri
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Yagnasri »

What is the cost of this at present? Suppose we organise a news website for example, in Indian rupees?
Sicanta
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Sicanta »

RBI to study Blockchain technology to curtail paper currency

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyd ... 771508.ece
Neshant
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Neshant »

I still do not fully understand block chain but one thought that leaps to mind is charity.

We dont know how much of our donations to charity actually reach the people rather than vanishing into bureaucracy. Maybe block chain can help track the flow of each dollar through the system so everyone gets to see where it goes.
panduranghari
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

Yag ji,

I do not understand the question. But let me try to answer it, in a way I can taking my limited understanding into account.

The cost of processing data through Blockchain technology is extremely energy intensive, at the moment. With the advent of quantum computing, that might reduce.

I think Chaanakya ji has posted some links which I shall read. Perhaps there will be more information about it.

Here is a video by Primavera De Phillipi on Blockchain.
What Internet did to communication, Blockchain will do to co-ordination.

Vayutuvan
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Vayutuvan »

Quantum computing can solve only certain kinds of problems. That too only if they are in what is called BQP. The relationship between BQP and NP is not known but what is suspected is below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BQP_ ... iagram.svg

What the above means is that all of problems in P and certain problems in NP and a few problems outside NP (they is far bigger hierarchy of the algorithmic complexity which encloses class NP) can be solved by quantum computers. Status of RSA is not known so is cryptanaylsis of RSA.

In essence, NP-complete problems remain NP-complete unless it is proved that P = NP. In that unlikely situation, we would not need a quantum computer unless of course we want to solve problems which are outside NP.

That is the first problem.

The second problem is technological. It is still a question whether a true quantum computer can be built. What ever they are advertising as quantum computer now (there is a company I guess which is marketing a QC) is not a real quantum computer in that it does not have the same power (in terms of classes of problems that can be solved) by the quantum computer that has been proposed.
vijayk
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Blockchain can solve many problems in Payments, Reconciliation, Insurance, Corruption, Healthcare, Investments, Custody, Govt. administration, voting.

The power of blockchain is in Smart contracts and removing centralization/middle men

http://www.coindesk.com/making-sense-smart-contracts/

The term “smart contract” has no clear and settled definition.

The idea has long been hyped to the public as a central component of next-generation blockchain platforms, and as a key capability for any practical enterprise application.

They are defined variously as “autonomous machines”, “contracts between parties stored on a blockchain” or “any computation that takes place on a blockchain”. Many debates about the nature of smart contracts are really just contests between competing terminology.

The different definitions usually fall into one of two categories. Sometimes the term is used to identify a specific technology – code that is stored, verified and executed on a blockchain. Let’s call this type of definition “smart contract code”.

Other times, the term is used to refer to a specific application of that technology: as a complement, or substitute, for legal contracts. Let’s name these “smart legal contracts”.

Using the same term to refer to distinct concepts makes answering even simple questions impossible. For instance, one question I’m often asked is simply: what are the capabilities of a smart contract?

If we are talking about smart contract code, then the answer depends on the capabilities of the language used to express the contract and the technical features of the blockchain on which it operates.

But if we are asking about using that technology to create a binding legal agreement, or an effective substitute for a binding legal agreement, the answer depends on far more than the technology. This answer depends on existing legal doctrine and how our legal, political and commercial institutions decide to treat the technology. If businesspeople don’t trust it, the legislature doesn’t recognize it and the courts can’t interpret it, then it won’t be a very practically useful “contract”.
vijayk
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Consider the follow use cases:

Running an insurance pool
Running an chitfund
Maintaining Titles of houses/land
Maintaining College Degree credentials

Govt. services

Singapore Govt is verifying double invoicing
Govt. subsidies can be verified for double payments
Govt. payments can be automated. Certification of service automatically makes payments
Govt can verify if payments were made to people authorized to receive payments

Basically every transaction,authorization/award,receipt can be routed to to Blockchain and a smart contract automatically pays.
svinayak
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by svinayak »

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/08/29 ... ness-unit/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... many-s-sap

Bitcoin Rival Ethereum Gains Traction
Ether’s value has rocketed this year, but a hack shows the digital currency faces familiar pitfalls
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-riv ... ad75f1560e
panduranghari
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

Etherum looks very promising.

Apple has punished itself. It has banned dashpay on ios. Dashpay is to cryptocoin network what apple pay is to current $ international monetary system.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum ... -resilient
CT: Ethereum and smart contracts: Do you feel that in the real world it would be difficult to understand for lay people?

TG: I believe a large part of the misunderstanding with so-called smart contracts is that the name is partially a misnomer. Really what we're talking about is programs on blockchains. These programs can be coded to do just about anything, but have the added benefit of digital uniqueness without central point of failure. From this point, lots of things are possible from digital assets to autonomous assistants.
T: What is the future of Ethereum in your view? Is it going to finally displace Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency of choice?

TG: People are waking up to the capabilities of blockchains beyond value transmission.

While this property does remain as a core component to any public blockchain, there are loads of opportunities for new projects to enter the industry and take a foothold.

No technology, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, is guaranteed to succeed, though I do think the segments of payments & remittance is Bitcoin's game to lose.

When I originally immersed myself in Bitcoin, low-cost near-instant microtransactions were a dream to build towards.

For that dream, I developed a short-lived service called Paythru, making it possible to send Bitcoin to digital entities that hadn't yet published a tipping address. Once updates like the "no dust" minimum were put in place, I started to encounter some of the limitations of Blockchain as "one chain to rule them all".
JE Menon
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by JE Menon »

http://akasha.world/

Interesting...a "next generation social network"...
SaiK
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by SaiK »

pooch: how will blockchain will be implemented in the land of lalloo maharaj?

:D

seriously it is a challenge
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just think about evil world transacting without a central power! hawala blocking eh?
dawood can never be tracked in the first place

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would any agreed blockchain execution deviate/circumvent say at each or some peer, there is a mandatory logging that is sent to CIA/FBI?
meaning, if interception is part of the blockchain node, how can you prevent your data is not exposed? [assume: at each node execution happens after decryption]
panduranghari
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

Laloo maharaj will have no control over implementation. What gives Laloo and ilk the power, is the deep pockets. Blockchain based transactions will be like the (Jan Dhan yojana)^n Transactions, storage and transfer of funds is but one aspect of it.

https://daowiki.atlassian.net/wiki/disp ... to+the+DAO
The ideal of a decentralized autonomous organization is easy to describe: it is an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do.

A DAO is represented by smart contracts on the Ethereum Blockchain. Its contains functions which, as a whole, have analogies to a crowdfunding vehicle governed by participants' votes, to seek out and fund proposals. Because the DAO consists of computer code, it interacts with the physical world through Contractors.The creators of these proposals act similar to a contractor, with the DAO as its client. The DAO therefore does not "invest" in these proposals, because it does not acquire equity in the contractors. Instead, in return for receiving a funding by The DAO, contractors deliver services, infrastructures or products yielding a return to The DAO.

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is a virtual entity that exists in cyberspace / the internet. It comes into existence when a group of people decide to form a DAO.

Once this initial decision to create is taken the participants may decide to extend participation to a wider community. It is possible that this process could well be entirely anonymous (subject to the technical skills of the participants).

A DAO may be established with a view to raising or investing / managing funds raised, for example to develop a specific idea or a range of ideas or within a particular sector. Alternatively the purpose of the DAO could well be civic - to remove the inherent weaknesses of outdated political structures. Participants / investors 'invest' their funds from their own cryptocurrency holdings or by converting fiat to Ether (the unit of the Ethereum platform). This transfer of ether appears on the Blockchain.
How did Dawood and his boss Haji Mastaan arise? Due to black market demand of Gold. Blame Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi for this.

If you use Tor, you would know only the entry and exit node can be tracked. Otherwise its more or less anonymous. Unless you enter into a contract with FBI/CIA, would they really know what transactions are happening? And here in is the conundrum. I believe its this anonymity that blockchain permits (thus reducing the need to put up with the rentiers), has spooked the governments in the west. They cannot extract resources from the sheeple and hence most of central banks are working on their own ideas of blockchain technology. Irrespective of what they do, blockchain will permit one to transact outside the government approved system. What gives the US their strength is not their military, but the global use of dollar as the mode of transaction. Blockchain tech takes that power away from any government.

I do not know but Arthakranti proposal might work very well with blockchain.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Attended MIT Blockchain meet today.

https://www.media.mit.edu/research/high ... initiative

The goal of the Media Lab Digital Currency initiative is to bring together global experts in areas ranging from cryptography, to economics, to privacy, to distributed systems, to take on this important new area of research. The effort will reach across the MIT campus, and we look forward to including collaborations with leading experts around the world. The initiative will work with Lab researchers and faculty across the MIT campus to explore the many issues involved in blockchain and bitcoin technology.

http://dci.mit.edu
panduranghari
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

Fascinating. ^
Last summer, after finishing my PhD at MIT (before that I was a software engineer at Google), I started reading about Bitcoin. I had friends who got excited about Bitcoin in its very early days, but it wasn’t until last year, when I realized that Bitcoin was the world’s largest consensus algorithm[1], that I began to understand its potential impact. Everywhere I looked, I found a need for a way to reach agreement with parties who don’t necessarily trust each other.

I spoke to people across industries who felt that an open, interoperable, censorship-resistant[2] platform for data agreement could help solve many of their problems–and these were real problems: micropayments to support content producers, digital identification to help refugees, and services like credit and cheap money transfer for the unbanked. Though the solutions are far from obvious, even the possibility of making a dent in these problems is worth exploring, and surprisingly, the people involved seem to think an open-access, cryptographically signed log could help. It became clear to me that not only is the world ready to embrace building more open, interoperable systems, but doing so could lead to solving a wide variety of problems.

MIT has a long history of supporting the development of technologies that provide freedom and privacy to users, along with useful features and strong guarantees of stability. At the Digital Currency Initiative, we want to leverage this talent base and bring people together to create the necessary trust paradigms required. As it turns out, this is a very challenging domain of research, and a large part of the community has given up on the possibility for these technologies to be truly open and decentralized. We want to serve as a balance to that viewpoint and engage in research that paints a path forward.

This area is especially interesting because it doesn’t fall entirely in any one academic discipline. Expediting the future of open, interoperable systems requires work across many different fields–distributed systems, cryptography, game theory, security, programming language design, databases, finance, behavioral economics, law, and more. This area is a great example of the “antidisciplinary” work that the Media Lab strives to foster–the space between the dots of traditional academic departments. This is exciting, but makes our job harder.

The past year was about learning, becoming part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain communities, and establishing a point of view. The next will be about building a strong research group, grounded in creating practical solutions. Right now, our group is working on projects that:

use novel cryptographic primitives for computation with privacy and auditability,
create decentralized monetary policy through techniques like decaying assets and in-protocol inflation,
examine bias in newsfeed algorithms and consider censorship-resistant mechanisms for publishing on the Web,
securitize smart property to enable new models for funding in the developing world, and
explore new ways of mining cryptocurrencies to ensure fairness and more open access to the system.
SaiK
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by SaiK »

I am thinking Hardware abstraction layers can support BC nodes. This would also enable in both north and south bound APIs in software defined networks. More on secured network focus cutting across layers.

Future scenario: I can utilize every CPU on the planet on a grid to do virtual server less computing.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by chanakyaa »

panduranghari
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

^
There is a talent shortage in the blockchain space says Behlendorf. As the field is very new, there aren’t many who understand “not only cryptocurrency and blockchain engineering challenges, but who also understand distributed systems.” He, therefore,argues that there are “no software development resources to spare.” Work is currently being duplicated, according to Behlendorf and there are “tremendous levels of tribalism amongst [open source] developers.”.....
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.....Talent attracts talent, especially when newcomers are welcomed. Currently, most of this talent is going to Ethereum. There are many reasons, such as its grassroot nature, an impeccable development team with the creator of smart contracts himself among them, a philosophy of “political neutrality”, primary focus on the technology, etc., but the main reason is because its currency – ETH – and its smart contracts capabilities, allows developers to release live projects which do cool new things that can be used today, potentially disrupting industries and, perhaps for some, even hitting the jackpot.

This combination has created an ecosystem where developers are flocking with almost one thousand hackers signed up for ether.camp hackathon. Household brands are following them, with Microsoft, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and Santander sponsoring Devcon2 while Thomson Reuters went even further, becoming the first multinational to produce a product for public blockchain use – Ethereum HD ID Wallet – we hope the first of many.
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Who had most influence towards the decision is a matter of opinion, but we can discern in a factual way three pillars that hold power – developers, miners (soon to be stakers) and exchanges with the media a fourth to hold all three to account. In a way, however, none of it matters because anyone can just fork at any time, but you have to persuade everyone else to join. A governance level could however, be added in regards to developers, decisions they make and any recommendation they provide. There is one more layer, the Governing Board, which is more related to Hyperledger’s business management – making sure we are spending the resources we get from the sponsoring members wisely, holding me and my team accountable for our performance, that sort of thing.....
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Public and private blockchains will, eventually, need to connect and communicate, with both public and private blockchains, like internet and intranet (which remains widely used by many companies), having their specific use cases, so collaboration is necessary, especially regarding standards and addressing common protocol challenges
vijayk
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Blockchain is all about cryptography, distributed consensus protocols and Multi signatures (more than one key for signatures).
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by ArmenT »

Accenture patents a method to edit blockchain
Editable blockchain controversery, but Accenture insists it would only be used under ‘extraordinary circumstances’
....
....
“For decentralized cryptocurrency systems, such permanent accounting has been crucial in building trust and faith among participants,” said Lumb. “But for financial services institutions faced with a myriad of risk and regulatory requirements, absolute immutability is a potential roadblock. Our invention strikes a balance for enterprise use that preserves the fundamental value of the technology while enabling enterprise adoption.”

The way this editing tool will work is that designated administrators (acting on agreed rules of governance) could edit, rewrite or remove blocks of information without breaking the chain. Accenture said it does this by using a new variation of what is known as the ‘chameleon’ hash function, which can recreate algorithms that link two separate blocks through the use of secure private keys.

The invention also offers a capability where any edit made to a block leaves an immutable ‘scar’ to indicate that the block was altered.

Accenture and co-developer Dr. Giuseppe Ateniese (of the Stevens Institute of Technology) have apparently filed patent applications for the invention in the United States and the European Union.
Of course, some people are treating this with suspicion because of Accenture's one-time connection to Arthur Andersen (although I believe that they weren't connected at the time of the Enron scandal that took down Arthur Andersen)
SaiK
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by SaiK »

It is not just Enron, but their setup was a whole 9 yard corruption oriented. If you ever loved your back scratched for fun, that was the place to be in.

Trusted participant in the chain may allowed to mute, with a scar log attached / say a byte of well defined published codes that all parties in the chain agree to?

I think we are concluding that nothing can be touched for a point to point communication. Then why we would need a chain? send the message direct? multiple hops and a requirement to view the message at each hop perhaps may not be what the chain is all about.

/trying to understand what is the issue/?
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Neshant »

panduranghari wrote: If you use Tor, you would know only the entry and exit node can be tracked. Otherwise its more or less anonymous. Unless you enter into a contract with FBI/CIA, would they really know what transactions are happening? And here in is the conundrum. I believe its this anonymity that blockchain permits (thus reducing the need to put up with the rentiers), has spooked the governments in the west. They cannot extract resources from the sheeple and hence most of central banks are working on their own ideas of blockchain technology. Irrespective of what they do, blockchain will permit one to transact outside the government approved system. What gives the US their strength is not their military, but the global use of dollar as the mode of transaction. Blockchain tech takes that power away from any government.
+1

Somehow i doubt rentier parasites will go quietly into the night.
panduranghari
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

True. They will attempt regulation. But I just wonder what exactly will they do?

http://www.weblaw.co.uk/ebooks/eGuide_B ... theLaw.pdf
It is worth noting that, for the purposes of UK law at least, it is difficult to find any legal grounds that
support the classification of crypto-assets that exist
only electronically within a blockchain (including,
but not limited to, bitcoins) as ‘property’.
To complicate matters further in the case of crypto-currencies, users technically have rights over
specific individual units of the currency (i.e. they can point to a particular bitcoins that they
personally own) rather than over generic amounts of inter-changeable currency units (e.g. a bank
balance) as is the case in a traditional cash-and-banks based system.
Without government regulation specifying that pa
rticular crypto-currencies/securities are to be
regarded as property (like shares and patents)
they remain intangibles which are not technically
property and in respect of which damages claims will be exceptionally difficult.
While on a practical level that key feature of blockchains enables them to
‘solve’ the issue of untrustworthy users of a networ
k and is one of their major selling points, it also
gives rise to the system’s most obvious Achilles heel, the ability of untrustworthy users to hide
behind the technology and evade remedial enforcement after deceiving or defrauding others.
The above problem above is solved by ethereum
Identity deception is another trust issue which may undermine blockchains. ‘Pseudonymity’
connotes that whereas a party’s online identity can be verified, its offline identity is unverifiable.
TBH I do not trust the government. ANd I see no effort by them to decrease the trust deficit
As technology lawyers, we do not feel threatened
by the advent of smart contracts. Someone still
needs to draw up the terms of the contract which is then encoded and someone needs to check that
the encoding is an accurate representation of those terms. Thus, it would seem that rather than
usurp the legal function, it will mean more co-operation between lawyers and
programmers. Heaven forfend, lawyers may even have to contemplate becoming competent
programmers themselves so that they can cover both aspects and increase their practice domain.
Blockchain is such a technology disruptor, that all those who have got used to a certain lifestyle find its advent will make them vestigeal. NO wonder the rentiers are trying to regulate it all.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »


“Our simulations suggest that this policy has a number of beneficial effects,” says the report, citing two major reasons:

1. An increase in GDP of almost 3%, as a result of the reduced interest rates, reduced tax rates and lower transaction costs that implementing a digital currency would bring. For example, a digital currency does not need intermediaries to settle the transaction, rather, money passes directly from one party to another.

2. The digital currency could also contribute to the stabilization of the economy because it would give central banks another means by which to control their currency. This would be particularly effective in times of economic shock, such as Brexit.

Other benefits of a digital currency include transparency.

Recently, J. Christopher Giancarlo, commissioner of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said: “At the heart of the financial crisis, perhaps the most critical element was the lack of visibility into the counterparty credit exposure of one major financial institution to another. Probably the most glaring omission that needed to be addressed was that lack of visibility, and here we are in 2016 and we still don’t have it.

“Well, blockchain technology [the technology behind digital currencies] now provides that visibility (as well as protections for privacy).”

The Bank of England report also highlighted possible negative aspects, not least of which are the risks inherent in transitioning to a different monetary and financial regime.

However, “this technology may present an opportunity to improve the efficiency, resiliency and accessibility of systems that facilitate monetary and financial transactions,” the Bank concluded.

Why is the Bank exploring a digital currency?

Blockchain primarily eliminates the need for intermediaries between transactions. It uses software that allows people to connect directly, and therefore at a reduced cost. And it’s got some big-hitters behind it. In a recent round of funding, Blockchain the company raised US$30m, with investors that included Richard Branson and Bill Gates.
Image

It’s not the first central bank to investigate the technology. The Bank of Canada is also exploring the use of blockchain technology to underpin a digital currency.

“Now is the time to make our core systems more efficient and competitive,’’ Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins said recently.

“One area that is attracting attention is distributed ledger technology (DLT), the protocol that underpins Bitcoin. DLT may hold great potential, but important technical, governance and regulatory issues must be resolved before its benefits can be realized.
A new report from the World Economic Forum predicts that blockchain will come to occupy a central place in the global financial system.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

How BlockChain will change your life

But under no circumstances should you print, say, money. So with the Internet of information we have to rely on powerful intermediaries to establish trust. Banks, governments, and even social media companies like Facebook work to establish our identity and ownership of assets. They help us transfer value and settle transactions.

Overall, they do a pretty good job -- with limitations. They use centralized servers, which can be hacked. They take a fee for their services – say 10 percent to send money internationally. They capture our data, not just preventing us from monetizing it, but often undermining our privacy. They are sometimes unreliable and often slow. They exclude two billion people who don’t have enough money to justify a bank account. In sum, they capture a lopsided share of the benefits of the digital economy.

Enter the blockchain, the first native digital medium for peer to peer value exchange. Its protocol establishes the rules—in the form of globally distributed computations and heavy duty encryption—that ensure the integrity of the data traded among billions of devices without going through a trusted third party. Trust is hard-coded into the platform. That’s why we call it the Trust Protocol. It acts as a ledger of accounts, a database, a notary, a sentry, and clearing house, all by consensus.

Every business, institution, government, and individual can benefit in profound ways. The blockchain is already disrupting the financial services industry.

How about the corporation, a pillar of modern capitalism? With this global peer-to-peer platform for identity, reputation, and transactions, we will be able to re-engineer deep structures of the firm for innovation and shared value creation.

How about these billions of connected smart things that will be sensing, responding, sharing data, generating and trading their own electricity, protecting our environment, managing our homes and our health? And this Internet of Everything will need a Ledger of Everything.

And how about growing social inequality? Through the blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity fairly in the first place, from cradle to grave. Including billions of people in the global economy: protecting rights through immutable records like land titles; creating true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on a blockchain; ending the remittance rip-off and helping diasporas return funds to their ancestral lands; enabling citizens to own and monetize their data (and protect privacy) through owning their personal identities rather than identities being owned by big social media companies or governments; uunleashing a new halcyon age of entrepreneurship by enabling small companies to have all the capabilities of large companies; helping build accountable government through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.

So rather than just re-distributing a posteriori, wealth we can pre-distribute a priori by democratizing the creation of wealth in the first place.

As with all major paradigm shifts, there will be winners and losers. But if we do this right, blockchain technology can usher in a halcyon age of prosperity for all.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by tandav »

In India payment followup is killing innovation and small firms. Can Blockchain handle a following Contract payment system proposed. Cross posted from Infrastructure discussion forum.

1) NECS/ECS mandate be signed by client to the vendor which allows monthly payments (as per predecided schedule and amount) to be deducted directly from client account while the work is progressing.
2) Client can terminate the contract (by submitting a NECS stop order form and/or a NECS reverse transfer of a certain amount) if they find the work is substandard or incomplete and process action to recover payments rather than the present case where vendors have to move heaven and earth to get their payments.
3) National contracts/invoice registry system (have some real nice startup ideas around this but need technical help to get it off the ground)
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

The above case can be done

1. Smart contracts - Look at platform like ethereum
2. Multi Sig Wallets - A lot of Bitcoin blockchain wallet system developed these kind of use cases.

A & B agree on terms. They create an escrow account with 3 signatures A, B & C where C is moderator. The amount is transferred when 2 of 3 parties agree or they unlock it with their private keys. In case of dispute resolution, moderator sides with appropriate party.

Time lock. Another feature is along with A & B, you can create time lock and action to take on expiry of time limit such as non-payment of lease/rent before given date transfers escrow payment to other party
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

VijayK saar,
Choosing a moderator potentially makes the system unstable.

The folks at Ethereum decided to reverse the contract to reclaim the hacked DAO itself lead to a split within the Ethereum community. Don't you think moderator could potentially become a bone of contention?

In one of the earlier post, the Linux foundation also are grappling with this issue.
Who had most influence towards the decision is a matter of opinion, but we can discern in a factual way three pillars that hold power – developers, miners (soon to be stakers) and exchanges with the media a fourth to hold all three to account. In a way, however, none of it matters because anyone can just fork at any time, but you have to persuade everyone else to join. A governance level could however, be added in regards to developers, decisions they make and any recommendation they provide. There is one more layer, the Governing Board, which is more related to Hyperledger’s business management – making sure we are spending the resources we get from the sponsoring members wisely, holding me and my team accountable for our performance, that sort of thing.....
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Moderator is a digital version of arbitrator who will release a key in case of disputes until legislative cover is provided for BC.

It is possible to design time locks, rule encoded locks in Multi Sig block chain technologies.

There is a a fascinating work going on to define legal contract language in a template form and smart contracts can interpret this. Most of the info is on MIT Digital currency initiative forums. please check it out.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

Thanks. Can you post it here for all of us?
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Singha »

CHENNAI: ICICI Bank on Wednesday said it has successfully executed international trade finance transactions and overseas remittances using blockchain technology in partnership with Emirates NBD.
This puts ICICI Bank the first bank in India and one among a few globally to carry out overseas transactions -- which typically take a few days -- in a few minutes via blockchain.
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The technology can be used to exchange and authenticate remittance transaction messages as well as original international trade documents related to purchase order, invoice, shipping and insurance. ICICI Bank executed these pilot transactions via a blockchain network, co-created with EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys.

"We have also marked a milestone by piloting a blockchain network with Emirates NBD as a partner and successfully executed cross-border open account trade finance and remittance transactions. I envision that the emerging technology of blockchain will play a significant role in banking in the coming years by making complex bilateral and multi-lateral banking transactions seamless, quick and more secure," said Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO, ICICI Bank.
With blockchain, all the parties -- the importer in Mumbai, ICICI Bank, the exporter in Dubai and Emirates NBD -- can view the data in real time. It helps track documents, digitally authenticate ownership of assets on unalterable ledger and execute transactions through encrypted and secure digital contracts.
With no manual intervention, the automated process allows courier of paper documents across countries and verification through trade intermediaries. The earlier process involved complex and lengthy paperwork with international shipping and courier. Among the pilot transactions was a confirmation of import of shredded steel melting scrap by a Mumbai-based export-import firm from a Dubai-based supplier.
Overseas remittances for retail customers at lower costs are also possible with the new technology in real time. Currently, international remittances take a few hours to up to two days
vijayk
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Guys

Checkout steemit.com
JE Menon
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by JE Menon »

^^^

Please explain in a few words what it is, always when you put a link. Let readers decide whether to click. Or else it looks like clickbait...
vijayk
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

steemi. com is totally based on blockchain. Similar to reddit but no central control. When people elect to LIKE blogs, the authors are rewarded with steem dollars which is also now trading on crypto exchanges.

A blog floats up based on how many likes in recent past.

Could be a model for our own news reporting sites such as first post which are bought and influence by Ambanis.

Could be even made to put video content in future.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@lukewearec ... to-steemit
How I Got Censored On Twitter And Now Running / Screaming Back To STEEMIT!!!
vijayk
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

PAYMENTS India’s Reserve Banks Wants To Digitize The Rupee On Blockchain

http://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments ... ent-rails/

Blockchain White Paper by RBI
https://idrbt.ac.in/assets/publications ... es/BCT.pdf

RBI bullish on blockchain
http://www.the-blockchain.com/2017/01/1 ... ettlement/
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by panduranghari »

RBI link is excellent. Will post some excerpts later.
Neshant
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Neshant »

vijayk wrote:PAYMENTS India’s Reserve Banks Wants To Digitize The Rupee On Blockchain
As long as other private blockchain currencies can exist alongside the digital rupee, I'm OK with it.

If govt's intention is to use it as a means to confiscate peoples' earnings & savings at will, then no thanks.
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by vijayk »

Is Bitcoin banned in India?
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Re: Blockchain technology

Post by Singha »

lightreading.com

IBM has launched a blockchain initiative with du, several Dubai government agencies and other companies to track goods going into and out of the United Arab Emirates city, which is one of the world's trading hubs.

Dubai is exploring use of blockchain for trade finance and logistics for import and re-export of goods from the United Arab Emirates city, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) said in an announcement on Tuesday.

The companies will use Hyperledger Fabric and IBM Cloud to transmit shipment data carrying real-time information about the state of goods and status of the shipment, IBM says.

du is providing data from Internet of Things devices; the Emirates NBD Bank is issuing letters of credit; Banco Santander is responding to the letters of credit; Aramex is the freight forwarder; and an undisclosed airline is providing air carriage. Dubai Customs, Dubai Trade and IT provider DUTECh are also involved in the initiative.

The organizations are looking to replace paper-based contracts with smart contracts, use Watson IoT for device-reported data to update or validate smart contracts and integrate all the trade process parties from ordering, when the importer gets a letter of credit from the bank, through freight and shipping, and ending with customs and payment, IBM says.

Dubai declared its intent to become a blockchain hub in February 2016. The city plans to execute all its transactions on blockchain by 2020.
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