Snippings

Forum friend Ian Grigg, who I always take very seriously indeed on any such topic, wrote about Corda on his blog and concluded with a powerful statement.

Bitcoin told the users it wanted an unstoppable currency – sure, works for a small group but not for the mass market. Ethereum told their users they need an unstoppable machine – which worked how spectacularly with the DAO? Not. What. We. Wanted.

Corda is the only game in town because it’s the only one that asked the users. It’s that simple.

From Financial Cryptography: Corda Day – a new force

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It seems to me, however, what Ian is pointing to as the greatest strength of their approach is also the greatest weakness. A staple feature of unimaginative management consultants presentations about innovation is some variation on the statement by Henry Ford that if you had asked users what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses coupled with some variation on the statement by Steve jobs that it was pointless asking users what they wanted, you just have to show them. In the context of the disruptive innovation analysis that we have all is a fair criticism of our 3 to say that they have been caught between two stools. On the one hand, their members want them to solve for problems that they already have in a context that they understand. Hence they want quarter to, essentially, emulate the kind of database solution that they are familiar with, potentially with some cost savings and some improved performance. But the more I think about it, and I think about it a lot, my experiences working with senior management teams in a variety of industries to help them to develop their strategies towards the general class a shares latest technologies and the specific technology of the block chain is that this new technology will have an impact not by making marginal improvements to the way in which markets function at present but by stimulating the creation of, in these new kinds of markets, the control transparency of transactions will have the most impact. This is why keep going on and on about ambient accountability.

 

I think am coming round to the point of view that block chain is a ragtag, not a thin tech.

 

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In the UK, there have been robberies in which large quantities of gold and silver have been stolen from homes (here’s some I wrote about a few years ago)

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Why would anyone mess about with physical gold that you can drop, lose, have stolen etc. And I bet it’s hard to buy anything from Amazon with it. I’m more than happy for people to send me gold (you’re welcome to try the experiment) but generally speaking I’d prefer the dematerialised version sent to my Goldmoney account.

From Just popping out to get some gold | Consult Hyperion

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Even i

 

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A return to the gold standard may be impractical or even undesirable, but the idea of new technology monetising the store of value that is gold seems altogether a different proposition.

From There have been worse ideas, surely? | Consult Hyperion

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The Royal Mint and CME Group, the diverse derivatives marketplace, are collaborating on a “digitised gold offering” which will be traded on a blockchain – to be made available at some point in 2017. The blockchain-based gold product, called Royal Mint Gold (RMG) will transform the way traders and investors trade, execute and settle gold, said a statement.

From The Royal Mint and CME to launch digital gold on blockchain

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[The Mint] will issue RMG as a digital record of ownership for gold stored at its highly-secure on-site bullion vault storage facility. CME Group will develop, implement and operate the product’s digital trading platform.

From The Royal Mint and CME to launch digital gold on blockchain

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Douglas Jackson is the Chairman and Founder of e-gold, one of the very first attempts to create an alternative electronic currency based on gold.

From Douglas Jackson, e-gold | Consult Hyperion

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Social media users should be forced to reveal their real names so police can track down jilted lovers who post “revenge porn”, a peer has said.

[From Revenge porn: Peer says Twitter users must reveal real names – Telegraph]

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Police later discovered Ghani and Mahmood carried out the fraud after stealing three utility bills from Mr To’s mailbox.

From Stockport identity fraud victim’s £500k home put on market – BBC News

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Even though many places now take credit cards, Apple Pay and other forms of cashless technology, the actual amount of notes and coins circulating in the country has doubled in 20 years. And that’s while the economy and population has shrunk.

More than 101 trillion yen (S$1.35 trillion) of cash was circulating at the end of October. It was used for more than 80 per cent of transactions by value in 2014.

From Cash is still king in Japan, and that could be a problem for BOJ, Government & Economy – THE BUSINESS TIMES

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What I expect most non-economists reading The Curse of Cash are confounded by is not the idea of abolishing physical notes and coins – on many levels this is appealing, particularly its consequences for criminal activity. No, what’s bizarre is his insistence on charging negative interest rates on cash to stimulate demand under deflation.

From Blogoff – The Curse of Cash – Philosophy of Money

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“Re-configurations takes time so it has to be done one by one. Things should be normal in ten days. You have to understand there are 2 lakh ATMs in the country but there are only three to four vendors.”

From Just 35,000 personnel to replenish ₹16 lakh crore in ATMs | business-news | Hindustan Times

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With largest ATM network in the country under its wing, SBI handles on an average 10 million withdrawal transactions involving cash worth Rs 2,800 crore every day.

From Banks to hire retired officials, extend working hours to stack up new currency notes in ATMs, branches | Business Standard News

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Well, that was the fun. The nice people at the Meaning Conference gave me 13 minutes to try to explain what a blockchain technology is, what blockchains might do, and what the implications might be, to an audience of largely creative people. Quite a challenge.

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Since they were creative types, I thought I ought to frame my explanations with poetry rather than mathematics. I decided to start with the Ur-statement of ordered immutability, the Rubiyaat of Omar Khayyam:

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

You can see the revised version of the slide deck here (we accidentally sent the wrong version on the day, but it really didn’t matter). It sets out the revised “4x4x4” model of shared ledgers, so that there is context for talking about the blockchain, and then quickly works through how there are different kinds of blockchains (and bitcoin is only one) and then gets to what I think will be the lasting impact: ambient accountability, new kinds of transaction environments where traditional auditing and policing are taken care of by the environment itself.

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In order to explain my focus on ambient accountability, we went back to poetry, this time with T.S. Eliot and choruses from The Rock (1934).

“They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

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They were kind to me with their feedback, although going back over the presentation I’m a little disappointed with it. I think I can do better to bring the new world of the shared ledger to the general audience. So I’d appreciate your feedback on two elements of the presentation. First, does the six layer “real world ledger” model help with the discussion or is it an unnecessary complications and second do the example ledgers presented across those six layers make sense? I want to quickly show the different types of ledger in one slide.

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Apple has signed a deal with credit card processing behemoth Cuscal, giving an additional 31 banks access to the Apple Pay contactless payment facility.

From 31 more Australian banks have partnered with Apple Pay | finder.com.au

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