• Tag Archives blockchain

  • The Thrilling and Sometimes Terrifying World of Crypto-Innovation Is at a Turning Point

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The Thrilling and Sometimes Terrifying World of Crypto-Innovation Is at a Turning Point

    It’s one thing to read about cryptoeconomics and another thing to actually do it. I had been reading about Bitcoin in the abstract from 2009, but it wasn’t until I became an owner in 2013 that I began to realize the implications of this technology.

    My boots were on the ground, as they say, and I saw and experienced things I never imagined possible. A money and payment system in one application? Made entirely from code? Invented by an anonymous programmer and gradually adopted in a globally distributed system run by hobbyists? The whole thing seemed crazy.

    I wanted to know more. So I organized one of the earliest national conferences on the topic in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2013, when the Bitcon/dollar exchange ratio had reached $100 from $14 at the start of the year. My purpose was to bring economists and technicians together to develop a better understanding of what exactly was happening.

    Last night, nearly four years later, I attended an exciting and passion-filled blockchain meetup in Atlanta. The Bitcoin price floats around $2,500, but this is off from a high that nearly touched $3,000. Many of the people who attended my first CryptoCurrency Conference were there again, but this time was different. Instead of being curious onlookers, many people in the room were part of what we might call the digital 1%: immense earnings based on speculative investments that paid off.

    The New World 



    Now times are getting serious. The biggest banks and brokerage houses are on board. Tens of thousands of blockchain startups exist. There is a crowdfunding campaign for a new digital service and token nearly every day.

    There are so many white papers being issued that no one can keep up. For all the world, it looks like Tulipmania except that this is what many people have claimed for eight years, during which time a new world has been born.

     During Tulipmania, you were right to be suspicious because tulips had always been around. They didn’t represent anything new. The blockchain is something completely new: a new technology for porting adaptable information bits into immutable bundles to move cheaply and quickly across geographically non-contiguous lines.

    With this new capability, spreading all over the world, a new class of geeks is leading a technological push to reconstruct the way we transmit money but also do contracts, property titles, and financial markets. All of this is based on a new way of commercial engagement, from dependency on intermediaries to working directly with each other.

    Block Size 

    But merely to reflect on the amazingness of all this is not what drew the group together. The topic of the night is the pressing issue of the block size, a debate that has been rumbling around for a couple of years but which now cries out for resolution. The problem is that the blocks in the chain are currently limited to 1 megabyte, which is too small to hold all the transactions (and more complex forms of information) that the network is trying to push through. This is making the use of the network more expensive and slower than it should be. For some payment processors, it is becoming an impossible situation.

    The core development team is famously conservative. In any case, merely busting the protocol with an arbitrary expansion is not a solution. What it needs is a long-term fix. Solutions were coming so slowly that a group of users acted to schedule the implementation of what amounts to a fork in the blockchain. (For more on the debate and the plan, and the difference between hard and soft forks, go here.)

    Regardless, on August 1, something big is going to happen. It will be the biggest change to Bitcoin since its inception, with the purpose of making it scalable to compete directly with conventional payment processing.

    The debate online can seem wickedly rhetorical, and forbidding to outsiders. For my own part, I’ve stayed out because I don’t have the level of technological knowledge sufficient to weigh in. Plus, having watched the community at work for years, I know by now that online sound and fury most often masks what is at the root a sober and prudent set of developers, miners, and users. Stephen Pair is most likely right: the great forking event will most likely be boring.

    The Exciting Stuff 

    If this debate is too much – and only industry insiders are really thinking and writing about it – consider another level of complication.

    Let’s talk about what used to be called alt-coins and the category of digital assets. (Incidentally, we are nearing the point where even the world alt-coin is deprecated. We now call them what they are: Litecoin, Dash, Dogecoin, and so on.)

    When I held my conference, there were a few additional coins floating around out there. Hardly anyone thought they were viable. Back then, Bitcoin was amazing when it passed the $10 mark. Today, there are 12 additional coins that float above $10, and three of those have market capitalizations above $1 billion.

    Here’s another interesting change: there are fully 18 digital assets that trade above $10. And 10 of these assets have market capitalizations above $1 billion. Most are based on Ethereum, which is a platform for the development of a new class of services running blockchain technology. At the time it was first described, it seems visionary but outlandish. A few years later, it is a reality in the making.

    I’ve been slow to get involved in the asset market, but just yesterday tried my hand at moving tokens around in the space. I can’t begin to describe to you the complications. This is not for mere mortals. As I performed the task of moving from one asset to another, switching platforms and watching for confirmations and thresholds, I felt that same sense of awe I had when I first received and sent bitcoins. If possible, it was actually more difficult.

    Why Is this So Hard? 

    There are two factors here. First, this is nowhere near ready for the mainstream consumer marketplace. For anyone but full-time code slingers, this feels like rocket science. Second, everywhere you move, you bump into evidence of government regulation of exchanges, dating from that fateful day in the spring of 2013 when the Department of Treasury decided to effectively shut down an entire class of entrepreneurial ventures.

    It’s hard enough to reinvent the infrastructure of the global exchange economy. It is too much to attempt this feat in the face of regulators who have no clue whatsoever about the structure and technology we are dealing with here. Governments are trying to retrofit a disruptive technology by trying to make them behave like the old forms they are trying to replace.

    All of this is enormously annoying. But let me say this: it is temporary. They can slow us down but they can’t stop us. You could feel it in the energetic meetup last night. These people are smart, dedicated, and they see the future. They won’t be stopped. More than that, because they are all owners and stakeholders in this new digital space, they have the passion to follow through.

    The sad fate of revolutionary technology like this is that it doesn’t gain popular enthusiasm until it is used by the average person. Even then, the period of awe only lasts a brief time until we just assume that the world was destined to work this way. It’s this way with map apps, email, electricity, flight, steel, soap, eyeglasses, or any other invention.

    Here’s to the innovators and entrepreneurs who just keep making the world better despite every barrier and despite the absence of public acclaim they so richly deserve.


    Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • How the Blockchain Prevented Digital Book Burning

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    How the Blockchain Prevented Digital Book Burning

    In 1952, a 32-year-old man called the Los Angeles fire department and asked them at what temperature paper burned.

    Strange question, yes.

    But the man had just written a book on a rental typewriter in the basement of a nearby university’s library. And now he needed to give it a name.

    Fortunately, the fireman on the other end of the line humored him.

    “Fahrenheit 451,” he said.

    The man hung up the phone. He had his title.

    The rest, as they say, is history.

    Cautionary Questions For a Cautionary World



    Ray Bradbury’s book, Fahrenheit 451, of course, is a classic. Even the introduction, written by Neil Gaiman, is brilliant.

    In it, Gaiman talks about the power of cautionary questions.

    There are three phrases, says Gaiman, which make it possible for speculative fiction (also known as science fiction) writers to write about the “world of not-yet.”

    These phrases are…

    What if…?

    If only…?

    If this goes on… ?

    These three questions help speculators to frame possible timelines for the future, wild as they may be, and to see what may come of them if the train remains on track.

    Gaiman elaborates on the three phrases:

    “What if … ?” gives us change, a departure from our lives. (What if aliens landed tomorrow and gave us everything we wanted, but at a price?)

    “If only …” lets us explore the glories and dangers of tomorrow. (If only dogs could talk. If only I was invisible.)

    “If this goes on…” is the most predictive of the three, although it doesn’t try to predict an actual future with all its messy confusion. Instead, “If this goes on…” fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved. (If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through text messages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine, will be outlawed.)

    It’s a cautionary question, and it lets us explore cautionary worlds.

    Thus, Fahrenheit 451, says Gaiman, “is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable and sometimes we take what we value for granted.”

    Indeed.

    Which is why, in light of a recent story we read about Berkeley’s run-in with a cohort of digital book burners, we thought we’d summon up those three phrases for our own purposes.

    What if… the State Had the Power to Burn Books at Will? 

    Our story today is nonfiction.

    It begins where most horror stories of the nonfiction variety begin… in Washington D.C.

    About a year ago, give or take, two employees of D.C.’s Gallaudet University – a school for the deaf – were outraged to discover some of UC Berkeley’s 20,000 free world-class lectures could not be accessed by those with hearing impairments.

    Unfortunate, indeed.

    But rather than contacting Berkeley to see if they could solve this problem amicably, the complainants turned directly to the DOJ for help.

    Bit hasty, we think.

    “After investigating the claims made by the two Gallaudet employees,” says Brittany Hunter on FEE.org, “the DOJ came to the conclusion that yes, Berkeley’s free online archive had in fact violated the ADA, particularly Title II, which mandates that all public audio and video content provide accommodations for the deaf and hard of hearing. Among these stipulations is the requirement that all applicable content offer closed captioning, which, regrettably, 543 of Berkeley’s videos were missing.”

    The DOJ then sent a letter to Berkeley essentially stating these videos needed to be reformatted to meet the criteria, else they would have to delete the archive completely.

    Problem is, Berkeley found, the requirements of the ADA would make for an extremely time-consuming and expensive endeavor. One they couldn’t reasonably justify undergoing.

    Last September, Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education at the University, said this:

    In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access.”

    Early March 2017, Berkeley officials made their final decision: They would, regrettably, begin removing all 20,000 of the files on March 15. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing – and will be doing for about the next five months.

    “Now,” says Hunter, “instead of one group of people having limited access to a very small portion of Berkeley’s extensive online library, the whole world will lose access to the entire archive.”

    (But don’t you worry. All is not lost! More on that in a moment.)

    If Only… We Chose to Create Rather Than Destroy

    The result of this story was entirely predictable. Government does not create wealth. In fact, it’s the best wrecking ball on earth for destroying wealth.

    It’s silly… in an age where we have all of the tools at our disposal to come together and peacefully fix our problems as a national and global community, too many of us still have this knee-jerk reaction to turn to the most violent solution (AKA the State) as a first resort.

    Crowdfunding, in this case, would’ve been a much better route than wasting precious time and resources demanding the State equalize the situation by flipping the proverbial game board mid-game.

    “Imagine,” Hunter writes, “an alternative reality where instead of pursuing legal action against UC Berkley, those who felt passionately about this matter joined together as a community and raised awareness and funds in order to provide the funding needed to have the 543 videos reformatted. If they had ‘criticized by creating,’ instead of by litigating, not only would the problem have been solved in a more productive manner than it actually was, but all parties would actually benefit in the end.

    “Berkeley,” Hunter goes on, “wouldn’t have to spend several months taking down its content, those who wanted the content adapted for those with hearing impairments would have not only gotten what they wanted, but they would have also raised awareness and possible donors to their own school. Additionally, the entire world would have also continued to benefit from the use of Berkeley’s material.”

    If This Goes On… ? The Digital Pitchforks Will Rise.

    If you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag, the protagonist, lives in a world where firefighters burn books and the State controls the spread of knowledge completely. (You should really read the book.)

    We could’ve very well gone down that dark path. But I think, thankfully, we chose a different route.

    With the incredible rise of the alt-media, especially over the past year, I think it’s safe to say the war on your mind has been won. The pearls of wisdom surround you – you are responsible for your own education now, not the State.

    And the more the State pushes its arbitrary agendas on the flow of information, I predict, the more the digital pitchforks will rise.

    “What if,” Bradbury asked himself in his run up to writing the book, “firemen burned down houses instead of saving them?”

    “If only,” he pondered, “books could be saved. If you destroy all the physical books, how can you still save them?”

    If he were alive today, we would whisper a single word in his ear in response…

    “Blockchain, Bradbury. Blockchain.”

    Berkeley’s 20,000 lectures, despite Berkeley pulling them offline via the DOJ’s orders, were never deleted.

    They’re still up. And they will be for as long as the Internet remains a thing.

    An enterprising blockchain-based company, called LBRY, copied all 20,000 of them before Berkeley took them down and have made them permanently available online – for free.

    “LBRY,” the team explains, “is the first truly free and censorship-resistant way to exchange content. The LBRY protocol provides a completely decentralized network for discovering, distributing, and publishing all types of content and information, from books to movies.

    “When publishing the lectures to LBRY, the content metadata is written to a public blockchain, making it permanently public and robust to interference. Then, the content data itself is hosted via a peer-to-peer data network that offers economic incentives to ensure the data remains viable. This is superior to centralized or manual hosting, which is vulnerable to technical failure or other forms of attrition.

    “While other archive teams have also backed up these lectures using traditional methods,” says the LBRY team, “publishing them to LBRY offers greater openness, usability, and robustness.”

    For more information on how LBRY managed to rescue 20,000 world class lectures from the digital book burners, click here.

    This, dear LFT patron, is how the war is won. No bullets necessary.

    P.S. Have something to say? Say it! Chris@lfb.org.

    Reprinted from Laissez Faire Books.


    Chris Campbell

    Chris Campbell is the Managing editor of Laissez Faire Today. Before joining Agora Financial, he was a researcher and contributor to SilverDoctors.com.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • So… What’s a Blockchain?

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    So… What’s a Blockchain?

    I live in the world of blockchain and smart contracts. I hear people using terms that remind me of when we were building the Web back in the 1990s: they are talking, but they aren’t understanding each other because they don’t have a common understanding of the terms of a new technological order.

    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.

    What Is a Blockchain?

    There is tremendous confusion over what a blockchain is. Ask ten experts, you’ll get eleven answers.

    I will offer my definition, hoping it will help people understand a bit better:

    A blockchain is a shared ledger that everyone trusts to be accurate forever.

    Let me unpack that.

    First, it has nothing to do with blocks and chains. If you hear someone answer the question by talking about blocks and chains, I submit that this person doesn’t get it. Yes, we have blocks and chains today, but the blocks and chains don’t matter. When we have $500 billion in value stored on shared ledgers, I hope there will be no blocks and chains involved.

    The key is the shared ledger. What’s a ledger? It’s a record of transactions. That’s it. That’s the “one simple trick” for changing the world completely, from top-down hierarchical institutions to autonomy, freedom, and self-determination.

    How? Sharing a ledger means we don’t both keep our own books, but rather we share a common set of books. We trust each other to keep a record of transactions that we both believe represents the truth.

    Magically, this enables us to get rid of banks, insurance companies, most government institutions, and even media companies. I’ll expand on that a bit more in another essay, but you can read many of the use cases on my website.

    Building the Trust Machine

    I said everyone trusts this shared ledger to be accurate, and that includes people who don’t trust each other. So the blockchain and smart contracts are called “the trust machine,” because we no longer have to rely on third parties to help us conduct business.

    Make a list of everything banks do. It comes down to trust — right? The rest is mechanics. We trust them to help us manage our money.

    How well has that worked out? How many billions have the top banks been fined for screwing their customers to increase fees? Many. Every bank is now under heavy pressure to reduce headcount and improve profits. We can do all those things now without banks, thanks to the trust we have in smart contracts.

    Forever. Forever is a long time. We call the blockchain “immutable,” because it would take something like $1 billion to hijack the bitcoin blockchain today and start changing records of past transactions.

    While it’s not impossible to do, it is very difficult to see how you’d make any money on that $1b investment. Because it’s an impractical use of hundreds of millions of dollars, we don’t expect anyone to change the record. In the future, when billions of records are on the blockchain, and when the blocks and chains are all gone, we’ll use trusted systems to execute smart contracts that will be as commonplace as using PayPal or ApplePay today. The difference will be that there won’t be any large institutions or fees involved.

    What Can You Do with a Blockchain?

    Here’s a slide I show three times during my talk:

    I mentioned smart contracts, the short version of which is: smart contracts let us program the assets on the blockchain, from cryptocurrencies to gold to diamonds to land to stocks and bonds and many other valuable things.

    Thus, the blockchain represents programmable money.

    If you can program money, you can replace most white collar workers with software. At my new company, that’s exactly what we’re working on.

    Where to Go from Here?

    This isn’t meant to be a complete overview. I’ll talk about smart contracts and other terms in in the future if people are interested. For now, I invite you to four web sites I have built to help people learn about the decentralized revolution:

    DecentralStation.com — my online starting point for your deep dive into the world of blockchain.

    Twenty Thirty — my new company, which is completely run on volunteer power and we’re having a great time changing the world.

    BusinessAgilityWorkshop — this site is dedicated to helping people build a decentralized, agile mindset. There are plenty of essays and short videos here.

    The Culture Deck — A well-referenced essay on the 24 aspects of culture you can start changing today that will lead you to a more vibrant, autonomous culture that can thrive on change.

    I’m giving several talks in London the week of March 20th, including my big introduction to blockchain. Please come learn.

    Feel free to leave comments and ask me what you’d like to learn about. I believe that William Mougayar is correct when he says that all technological shifts are much more about attitude, culture, and business process change than they are about the actual new technology.

    Once you see the world from a more adaptive, agile mindset, you’ll see that the blockchain really is going to change everything forever.

    Republished from Startup Grind.


    David Siegel

    Entrepreneur, investor, start-up coach, and consultant – working to bridge the gap between perception and reality in business. See www.businessagilityworkshop.com

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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