There is much debate these days as to whether the gig economy is growing or shrinking, but most agree it’s still massive and, importantly, ripe for disruption.
Flashback to 2013, before Bitcoin and blockchain took the public by storm. I was sitting at home when my teenage son asked me when Overstock was going to start accepting Bitcoin as payment.
Ever since January of 2009, blockchain technology has been growing and evolving. What was once thought of as a fad, now stands on the brink of changing technology in a way that history will come to see as the time before blockchain, and everything that came after.
I didn’t hate it. The report adequately explained blockchain, debunked a few common myths, and presented a not-unproductive framework for blockchain use cases. As a former consultant at Bain, I dig these sort of reports.
iXledger, a company founded in early 2017 in London, U.K., has launched Blockchain Insurance, a platform that enables blockchain companies to obtain business insurance quotes based on a risk assessment. The platform presents exposures in metrics relevant to the underwriters, insurers and reinsurers.
Blockchain technology came part and parcel with cryptocurrencies, and no matter how hard the institutionalized investors, bankers, and regulators try, there is no splitting them.
Cryptocurrencies and the underlying distributed ledger technology have exploded into public consciousness over the last few years, with devotees insisting that the technology will revolutionise financial transactions and ownership data.
We know two things about blockchain: it's changing the world and a lot of people don't know what it is. Put simply, blockchain is a type of digital ledger that monitors the ebb and flow of assets among a network of users.
How technology is transforming transactions.
You may have heard the term ‘blockchain’ and dismissed it as a fad, a buzzword, or even technical jargon. But I believe blockchain is a technological advance that will have wide-reaching implications that will not just transform the financial services but many other businesses and industries.
This is part of "Blockchain Decoded," a series looking at the impact of blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrency on our lives. These days, we're having a harder and harder time trusting each other.
You keep hearing the word and it isn't going away. You admit defeat of your lack of knowledge and find yourself Googling "What is blockchain?" Decentralized, tokens, ledgers....you'll quickly find yourself down a rabbit hole of even more confusion.
Let's face it. Many people are resistant to technological changes in both their personal lives and at the office. However, what they often lack is the vision to see how the new technology they are resisting will improve their lives in the future.
Over the past decade, an alternative digital paradigm has slowly been taking shape at the edges of the internet.This new paradigm is the blockchain. After incubating through millions of Bitcoin transactions and a host of developer projects, it is now on the tips of tongues of CEOs and CTOs, startup
"Imagine a technology that could preserve our freedom to choose for ourselves and our families, to express these choices in the world, and to control our own destiny, no matter where we lived or were born.
Historically, no asset has been a greater source of wealth creation than the stock market. Throughout its history, stocks have returned an average of 7% per year, inclusive of dividend reinvestment, and when adjusted for inflation.
There’s a lot of hype in the air about blockchain technology at the moment. A recent World Economic Forum report predicts that by 2025 10% of GDP will be stored on blockchains or blockchain related technology.
Last year, Ripple Labs, creator of the virtual currency XRP, was fined $0.7 million (~£540,000) by the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for violating regulations concerning money laundering.
Unless you’re hiding under the rock, I am sure you’d have heard of Bitcoins and Blockchain. After all, they are the trending and media’s favorite topics these days — the buzzwords of the year.
If you’re here, we assume that you’re a developer/hacker who’s intrigued by the blockchain. You’re convinced that you understand how it works and now you’re itching to figure out what the blockchain means for you and your developer skill set.
Canadian writers and researchers, Alex and Don Tapscott, authors of the new book Blockchain Revolution, explain that blockchain goes way beyond the second coming of the internet.
Few people understand what it is, but Wall Street banks, IT organizations, and consultants are buzzing about blockchain technology. It's hard to remove blockchain from Bitcoin, so we'll start with Bitcoin as we work to understand this technology's potential. Bitcoin. Blockchain. Cryptocurrencies.
Since its advent in 2009, bitcoin’s decentralized, broker-less and secure mechanism to send money across the world has steadily risen in popularity and adoption.
While much of the discussion around blockchain has surrounded bitcoin and its ups and downs, corporations and businesses are quickly waking up to the possibility of using blockchain to secure and improve large volumes of transactions as well.
Last week I led a workshop at NYU’s Bitcoin Hackathon, HackBit, where I talked about Bitcoin as a Protocol, alternative uses for the Blockchain, and a little bit about the challenges and opportunities that lie therein.
Blockchain is so hot right now. 2015 was the year the narrative changed. Bitcoin is out, blockchain is in. Attend any financial conference and you’ll hear panels about the brilliance of private distributed ledgers.
Cryptocurrency created quite the buzz this past year. Although the technology has been around for a few years, 2017 was the year it really took off. Bitcoin, the first application of cryptocurrency technology, hit $20,000 a coin, while coins like Ethereum also saw their prices increase.
The first Bitcoin paper was first released in 2008. My excitement about the potential of blockchain technology has been building ever since. Decentralized digital currency, once just a far-fetched goal, is finally making inroads into the mainstream.
SAN FRANCISCO — Worried about someone hacking the next election? Bothered by the way Facebook and Equifax coughed up your personal information? The technology industry has an answer called the blockchain — even for the problems the industry helped to create.
After spending two years researching blockchain and the evolution of advanced ledger technologies, I still find a great spectrum of understanding across my clients and business at large about blockchain.
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions.
I’m fed up with the hype around blockchain. It’s not rocket science, it’s not revolutionary and it’s not even that smart. And it’s not going to change the world.
A year ago, Alex Tapscott (my co-author of Blockchain Revolution) and I made some predictions for 2017. At the end of the year we compared those predictions to what had actually occurred. Overall they stood up well.
I had a breakthrough in my understanding of blockchain when I heard someone explain that conceptually it is NOT a network of computers. A blockchain IS a computer.
We dive into one of the world's most popular cryptocurrencies, from a simple explanation of what Ethereum is to some of the currency's uses and drawbacks (and what it has to do with cats). Think of Ethereum as bitcoin’s multi-talented, more versatile younger sibling.
Is Blockchain the Swiss Army Knife to All of Our Cyber-Insecurities? Best known as the immutable database that runs underneath cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is poised to play a critical role in every industry imaginable as businesses seek ways to cash in on the distributed
Five forces of blockchain technology could affect the creative economy. Here are some of the risks and challenges to overcome. Many readers will be familiar with blockchain as the underlying enabling technology developed for Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency.
We’ve all heard that blockchain will revolutionize business, but it’s going to take a lot longer than many people claim. Like TCP/IP (on which the internet was built), blockchain is a foundational technology that will require broad coordination.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies made a lot of noise lately. I have been rather disappointed by the turn the cryptocurrencies took, from an amazing concept to what seems just another way to make quick money ( or not... ).
Unless you’re hiding under the rock, I am sure you’d have heard of Bitcoins and Blockchain. After all, they are the trending and media’s favorite topics these days — the buzzwords of the year.
Known by many as the technology underpinning the bitcoin digital currency, blockchain has acquired a new identity in the enterprise.
All of a sudden, blockchain is everywhere. The technology, which was invented in 2008 to power Bitcoin when it launched a year later, is being used for everything from copyright protection to sexual consent (yes, really).
Humanity’s earliest, truly transformative general purpose technologies were the ability to cross-fertilise plants and cross-breed animals. Suddenly, it made more sense to farm than to hunt and gather.
Blockchain technology was developed for the bitcoin virtual currency, but increasingly it’s being used to track and authenticate all kinds of assets, from stocks and bonds to electrons.
These days not a single meeting with a fellow VC goes by without talking about Blockchain and how to invest in this space. We are all a bit puzzled by how quickly this market has evolved.
The worst part is not that they don’t understand each other but that they think they do understand each other! Here, I’d like to offer a few basic definitions from my keynote speech that I hope will help people get on the same page and collaborate.
Blockchain technology is all the rage right now for geeks, anarchists, gamblers and corporate executives, with a vast spectrum of motivations and visions for future use cases.
The blockchain technology is probably the best invention since the internet itself. It allows value exchange without the need for trust or for a central authority. Imagine you and I bet $50 on tomorrow’s weather in San Francisco. I bet it will be sunny, you that it will rain.
Imagine you didn’t need to trust a stranger to make a deal with them. Imagine you didn’t need to trust your bank to deposit your money there. Imagine you didn’t need to trust your government to know it was being just and fair. What would happen?
Blockchain technology has the potential to upend the way every industry manages its information and data, not only financial services. Imagine being able to track shipments through your supply chain with ease, down to the individual package or even component level.
Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person.
You don’t understand blockchain. Well, maybe you do. But if you don’t see what all the fuss is about, wonder why anyone uses blockchain technology instead of Postgres, or think Tor figured out decentralization long before Bitcoin, then I have some news for you:
The potential of blockchain technology to disrupt nearly every industry in some way cannot be dismissed even though there are still several hurdles to overcome before we see its full transformative impact.
This post was co-written by Jordan Odinsky and Mohit Mamoria. In the past few months, blockchain technology has blown up. While a year ago blockchain was an unknown side note synonymous with Bitcoin, today there are dozens of applications making their way into mainstream media.
Blockchains are very much the hype, gaining traction even within the enterprise technology portfolio; they seem to be all but a panacea to "fix" every new application that comes to mind.
Surely it's more complicated? Yes - but as a concept, not much more. Complexities come in the implementation and the journey to realize value from such implementations. The above example will, of course, be overly simplistic for some – but may be a starting point for others.
This is a lightly edited version of my tweetstorm on ICOs which went viral. Mostly I just added links. The recent Munchee ICO shutdown is a good example of what’s here now, and what’s to come.
Looking for a New Cryptocurrency? Check out the Metabase ICO How to hire a blockchain developer.
Blockchain is an algorithm and distributed data structure designed to manage electronic cash without any central administrator.
Josh Stark is a lawyer and head of operations and legal at Ledger Labs, a blockchain consulting firm and development group. In this op-ed, Ledger Labs head of operations Josh Stark takes a deep dive into the concept of smart contracts.
The blockchain hype train is at an all time high! There are countless articles and news stories calling it the greatest invention since the internet. On the other hand, there is an equally large camp saying that although the tech is great, there is no real use case.
An expensive work of art changes hands. Neither the buyer nor the seller is named publicly, but the exchange is verified, the provenance of the painting travels with it, and the artwork is automatically insured against theft.
The word “bitcoin” was a top search on Google this year, as everyone who didn’t understand the cryptocurrency (which was most of us) rushed to learn how it works and how they could make money off of it. Some people did make money, at least on paper.
Hackers can shut down entire networks, tamper with data, lure unwary users into cybertraps, steal and spoof identities, and carry out other devious attacks by leveraging centralized repositories and single points of failure.
Like most of the people who got into the blockchain space in 2017 we all had to wade through a sea of BS, incomplete information, and a whole lot of market fluctuations. It was a great ol’ time.
When an E.coli outbreak at Chipotle Mexican Grill outlets left 55 customers ill, in 2015, the news stories, shutdowns, and investigations shattered the restaurant chain’s reputation. Sales plummeted, and Chipotle’s share price dropped 42%, to a three-year low, where it has languished ever since.
Swirlds is a software platform that has developed the hashgraph consensus algorithm: an entirely new distributed ledger technology that is much more cost-effective (no proof-of-work), 50,000 times the speed, safer (Byzantine), more efficient (no stale blocks) and mathematically fairer than the bloc
To understand the transformation that’s being brought about by blockchain technology, it’s useful to start with its largest implementation to date: bitcoin.
After many friends and family members asked me to explain my investments in blockchain assets, I decided to write an email. That email turned into this blog post. The following post is intended for the uninitiated but I hope those familiar with the concepts will benefit from this lucid overview.
There are conferences and foundations and consortia and keynotes; it’s the new hotness! But I looked into blockchain technologies carefully and I’ve ended up thinking it’s an overpromoted niche sideshow. First off, I should say that I like blockchain, conceptually.
Blockchains are one of the most important technologies to emerge in recent years, with many experts believing they will change our world in the next two decades as much as the internet has over the last two.
I've been hearing that more and more from prominent tech visionaries. And it's so incredibly wrong. But before I begin, I want to make sure I'm interpreting it the way people actually mean it. To wit, when I hear the above, I interpret it more precisely as:
Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin and other digital currencies, isn’t quite as novel or omnipotent as many have advertised it to be. That doesn’t mean, however, that it can’t do wonders in the world of finance.
It’s got stiff competition, but ‘blockchain’ might just be the 2017 tech buzzword of the year.
A blockchain is a digital ledger of records that’s arranged in chunks of data called blocks. These blocks then link with one another through a cryptographic validation known as a hashing function. Linked together, these blocks form an unbroken chain — a blockchain.
I’ve been reading this weekend. It was written by AVC community member William Mougayar. This book started out as a Kickstarter project which I blogged about at the time. If you backed that project you will get a copy of this book. If not, you might want to get a copy on Amazon.
If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.
In the past few years, blockchain has developed an unrivaled reputation as the next big thing for the decentralized internet.
Note: I mention the names of various projects below only to compare and contrast their token sale mechanisms; this should NOT be taken as an endorsement or criticism of any specific project as a whole.
There are several reasons why an industry needs to be disrupted. Consumer demands and expectations change over the years and it becomes essential for there to be a shakeup within an industry.
At around 7 p.m. every night you can catch me reading bedtime stories for my two children. On current rotation: Dave's Cave, a weird Avengers book and a million bedtime stories about dinosaurs.
“Blockchain technology continues to redefine not only how the exchange sector operates, but the global financial economy as a whole.” – Bob Greifeld, Chief Executive of NASDAQ “In financial markets there’s always a mechanism to correct an attack.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Cryptoeconomicon conference (centered around the O’Reilly Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference).
Start reading Blockchain, by Melanie Swan, to discover the blockchain's disruptive potential.
If there is a “sweet spot” for blockchain, it will likely be the ability to turn insights and questions into assets. Blockchains will give you greater confidence in the integrity of the data you see.
Blockchain also has potential applications far beyond bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Blockchain is, quite simply, a digital, decentralized ledger that keeps a record of all transactions that take place across a peer-to-peer network.
There are, believe it or not, many among us who remain skeptical that blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum will ever have much of an impact on the mainstream tech world.
Why was peer-to-peer file sharing a failure? In a torrent system, anyone can share their file with a decentralized network. The idea was that people would download them and keep seeding aka sharing the file with the network for others to download. The problem was that this worked on an honor system.
It is undeniable that AI and blockchain are two of the major technologies that are catalyzing the pace of innovation and introducing radical shifts in every industry.
Bitcoin and Blockchain are the buzzwords of the year. If you ever find someone feeling left behind and wondering, “WTH is the Blockchain?”, you know you can direct them to this guide. Unless you’re hiding under the rock, I am sure you’d have heard of Bitcoins and Blockchain.
comments By Tom Cusack, Data Scientist in the Banking Sector I think for many people out there, Blockchain is this phenomenon, which is hard to get your head around.
Blockchain has arrived — not just in the technological sense, but in the cultural one. We know this because our sixty-something-year-old mothers have started to ask us about it. Also, because it’s popping up in Dilbert comics.
Blockchain technology is gradually transforming peer-to-peer interactions in the digital world, disrupting traditional processes across almost all industries. Corporations including IBM, WalMart and Nestlé now look toward this new technology to improve on current systems.
Blockchain technology is set to have a profound impact on a wide variety of industries, ranging from capital markets to the music business. While some use cases may seem obvious, the technology is still surrounded by its fair share of hype and uncertainty.
ICOs are said to be the new way to raise money. We’ve seen companies raising $100 million, $156 million, $185 million and even $232 million by selling tokens that will be used in the protocol that these companies have promised to build using this money.
In the years following the 2008 crisis, subscription-model companies emerged in droves.
Is blockchain poised to be “the next big thing” in education? This has become a question I hear with increasing frequency about a technology that, up until quite recently, was primarily associated with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Note: Part 2 of this piece can be found here. Although some think blockchain is a solution waiting for problems, there’s no doubt that this novel technology is a marvel of computing. But, what exactly is a blockchain?