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There are very few fundamental shifts in global infrastructure that can happen in our life times. The financial infrastructure is one of them, and the Blockchain is changing the way we think about the transfer of value.
On the blockchain, you have a public ledger, which is the form of ownership. That means you are not doing net settlement - just netting everything down, which means that everything has been turned into fungible numbers.
The virtues of the blockchain is that it would be that it's peer-to-peer settlement - no centralized settlement, no manipulation... And most importantly, there's nothing to capture. It's consensus based. It's stateless.
You could imagine something like a completely automated system for renting bikes that's just done completely over blockchain crypto-payments. And theoretically just sort of start it up, and it works completely autonomously.
Few incumbents will succeed in deploying blockchain applications to enable new business models. The innovator's dilemma will prevail. Even if they aspire to, they must first get their feet wet within their business boundaries.
Blockchain startups are suffering from a crippling, archaic, and antiquated state regulatory system - and it's driving innovation abroad. Many blockchain start-ups trigger or may trigger money transmitter laws and regulations.
If you think about any multiparty process where shared information is necessary to the completion of transactions, and the coordination of activity and the exchange of value, that's where blockchain technology can be put to good use.
Blockchain assets derive value from their usefulness. Bitcoin has value because people value the payment network. BTC is required to use the network, so people demand it. If Bitcoin continues to be useful, it will continue to have value.
Blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity to mutualize database infrastructure across entities within financial services. What that translates into is an enormous cost-saving, risk-reducing, and capital-enhancing opportunity.
People didn't know where they could trade. When everybody owes each other IOUs that can be in multiple places at once, that's how the system couldn't tell any more who owned what and who owed what to whom. Blockchain could have prevented 2008.
There will be many types of assets codified into the blockchain, and they are all not just going to be on the bitcoin blockchain - it's going to be a number of different assets here. And the best way to invest in that is a diversified portfolio.
Blockchains are digital organisms. As organisms evolve through changes in their DNA, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code. And like biological organisms, the most adaptive blockchains will be the ones that survive and thrive.
As a Millennial and Gen Z expert at Accenture I had the opportunity to host and lead several workshops and panels with key clients at industry events. The topics ranged from virtual reality to blockchain; artificial intelligence to machine learning.
Big companies do not want to disrupt themselves. All they want to do is improve themselves. They see the blockchain as another IT project. It's going to save money; it's going improve a process here and there. It's not going to change their business.
The thing that I often ask startups on top of Ethereum is, 'Can you please tell me why using the Ethereum blockchain is better than using Excel?' And if they can come up with a good answer, that's when you know you've got something really interesting.
The blockchain start-ups that have done ICOs are just at the beginning of something. Ask me how they are doing in a year or two years from now. I know for a fact it won't be any different from the statistics of all start-ups: 80% of them will not make it.
The ledger, the distributed database - it's called a Blockchain - is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can't be broken by any of them. It's cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.
The blockchain is to money what SMTP is to email. It's an open way to move value around. Every existing player in this space - not just Venmo but also Google and Facebook and others - are all closed; they all want to work just within their own walled garden.
People bought bitcoin because they thought it would be worth more tomorrow. And a lot of people got lucky. But we're not seeing real people use bitcoin. And we don't know what problem it solves. Now, blockchain, I think, is a genius advancement in technology.
In my opinion, one of the most exciting potentials of the blockchain relate to creating new business models, whether in public or in private settings. In most of these cases, the new models don't care for incumbents because they are mostly on a disruption quest.
I call the blockchain 'the Internet of value' and 'the Internet of trust.' Because everything becomes trustless. It's a big distributed ledger. Think of it like an Excel file that's being maintained and updated and managed by millions of computers around the world.
Right now, you've got three days between a trade and a settlement, with hundreds of millions in settlement risk tied up in that time. That all goes away in a blockchain system because you've reunited the trade with the settlement. They're not two separate processes.
Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.
There is definitely a lot of banks that are interested in private blockchains. In some cases, they are happy with public blockchains as well. The opposition to just doing things on a public blockchain is definitely smaller than some of the strongest detractors think.
Study how to write smart contracts, which is the basic unit of programming a blockchain for business purposes. It is the equivalent of being taught HTML and Java during the early Internet days. And master how to create assets or tokenize existing ones on a blockchain.
Scalability is this idea of coming up with a blockchain that can scale much larger than existing chains essentially by processing transactions in parallel. And moving away from this paradigm where every single node on the network has to process every single transaction.
In fact, blockchain has the potential to fundamentally change how we share information, buy and sell things, interact with government, prove our identity, and even verify the authenticity of everything - from the food we eat to the medicine we take to who we say we are.
If blockchain technologies ignore the eventuality of standards, we are going to see less adoption. Maybe we should think of the blockchain as a public-good utility and encourage an evolution that is not unlike the Internet's in terms of openness and neutrality of access.
Everyone, it's okay to say the word 'bitcoin' and acknowledge that it is the actual platform that is driving this innovation that we're all building on. It's also okay to say 'the bitcoin blockchain,' or 'the blockchain,' if you're afraid that people will think you're weird.
What's really happening is that every bank in the country is experimenting with the blockchain and experimenting with bitcoin to figure out where the value is. For the first time ever, they're working hand in hand with startups. Banks are asking startups for help to build products.
Polychain is investing in blockchain assets. We do not invest in private companies or hold shares in private companies. We invest purely in tokens or digital assets, and those include assets that people are familiar with, like bitcoin and ethereum, as well as very early-stage projects.
Every smart person that I admire in the world, and those I semi-fear, is focused on this concept of crypto for a reason. They understand that this is the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution: steam engine, electricity, then the microchip - blockchain and crypto is the fourth.
An aftermath of real failures can make the whole blockchain ecosystem more resilient because it will result in revealing the boundaries and realities of what's possible, useful, absurd, impossible, repeatable, and scalable out of everything that appears plausible and innovative at the beginning.
The blockchain concept was pioneered within the context of crypto-currency Bitcoin, but engineers have imagined many other ways for distributed ledger technology to streamline the world. Stock exchanges and big banks, for example, are looking at blockchain-type systems as trading settlement platforms.
There's all these proofs that go on of identity, of records, and they're quite non-digital. The blockchain innovation really allows us to take everything where there's record keeping, everything where there's trust around record keeping, and it allows us to make that digital, immutable, permanent, and global.
There are regulators at the SEC and elsewhere who are really excited about the potential of the blockchain. They understand you can build a robust financial system - it would solve all your black swan problems. All kinds of mischief and games that are played in the current system become impossible in this system.
Giving users easy access to many different kinds of digital assets on the blockchain and, particularly, tokens that are linked to assets in the real world, is crucial to seeing blockchain adoption reach the next level, and I applaud Digix Global's initiative in being the first of many such projects to successfully launch.
Exchanging bitcoin on behalf of ransomware victims should not be construed as criminal activity by the exchanger, not as a matter of law nor as sound policy. Such an interpretation would set a precedent that would surely cause real harm to the public, to the blockchain ecosystem, and to the financial services industry as a whole.
The blockchain is custom-made for decentralizing trust and exchanging assets without central intermediaries. With the decentralization of trust, we will be able to exchange anything we own and challenge existing trusted authorities and custodians that typically held the keys to accessing our assets or verifying their authenticity.
After two years working with bitcoin and blockchain companies and corporate leaders, we identified that a significant issue hindering the widespread, global adoption of blockchain is the inability to quickly connect with the right combination of partners for testing and deployment of the technology to address real-world business challenges.
It doesn't always make sense to have a token on the blockchain that is both useful and represents ownership - it has to be something where there's a network effect. That's why I cite Facebook as an example of what could be disrupted more so than, say, Amazon - which is bit more centralized and is not exactly a network of users in the same way.
We need to come up with use cases for this technology that drive clear benefits for individuals and institutions - these are our customers. Too often we see bitcoin and blockchain technologies as solutions in search of a problem. We don't just need these systems to be technically better than the alternatives - we need them to be more user-friendly.