Cryptocurrency

Blockchain enthusiasts on Wall Street herald the technology as transformative to the financial world and insist that it will challenge legacy payment institutions. Billions of dollars in venture funding have been poured into blockchain startups. And companies from Facebook to IBM to Accenture are hiring up a storm for blockchain specialists. But a new report from JPMorgan on Thursday is throwing cold water on some of the hype. "Blockchain is unlikely to re-invent the global payments system, but instead can provide marginal improvements to various parts of the process," the report said. JPMorgan is just is the latest prominent firm to express skepticism that the technology - which underpins cryptocurrencies - can revamp the world's financial system anytime soon. Sign up here for our weekly newsletter Wall Street Insider, a behind-the-scenes look at the stories dominating banking, business, and big deals. European Central bank President Mario Draghi, the CEO of Spa...

Central American migrants walk through an improvised refugee camp at the Benito Juarez sports center in Tijuana, Mexico, on Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Photographer: Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg © 2018 Bloomberg Finance LP Worldwide, a new surge in refugees is occurring. From the southern border of the United States to the Middle East, the number of displaced keeps on growing.  One out of every five refugees estimated to have crossed from Libya to Europe has drowned or disappeared. More than 50 million people are estimated to have been forcibly displaced from their homes. There are more people displaced now then at any other time post-World War 2. How could new technologies and innovations like blockchain and cryptocurrencies help? 1- By helping digitize identity and other essential documents Many of the displaced are stateless and have lax documentation. This is a problem for them in transit and for any future destination countries. The Norwegian Refugee Council noted tha...

A study last year reported that 81 percent of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy, and a majority have a hybrid of private and public clouds. That’s a significant number of companies struggling to manage complex existing networks and multiple clouds as well as the associated security strains . Blockchain technology may still be the new kid on the block, but it has a lot of promise in exactly this kind of environment. Let’s take a look at two common challenges where blockchain has potential: Making clouds talk to each other No matter the reason that necessitates a multi-cloud or hybrid setup, the associated networking challenges are almost always the same. Instances in each cloud provider are typically in their own private network and can’t see each other — let alone communicate — without significant routing or firewall configurations. Each instance essentially lives in a silo without any interconnection. If the instances do get bridged, it’s an entirely different challen...

The crypto asset market has lost more than 85 percent of its market cap from its peak. But to me, a committed crypto entrepreneur, this is actually a good thing, and the future of crypto looks more promising than ever. The craziness started by the ICO boom in 2017 had at least one strong positive impact : It introduced crypto into the mainstream and attracted many talented people into the crypto ecosystem. The  crash  will continue kicking out speculators and scammers, setting up a healthy market where investors search for real value. Thinking back and looking forward, now is a good time to reflect on where real value will be created and where the biggest value will be captured. Fat protocols revisited First introduced in August 2016, the  fat protocols  thesis argues that in the Internet technology stack, protocols created tremendous value but nearly all that value was captured by the web applications like Google, Facebook, and Amazon built on top of those protoco...

The technology that made cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin possible is now gaining ground in agriculture. Those two things may seem worlds apart, but stakeholders in the ag industry are now looking at blockchain technology to connect buyers and suppliers that are worlds apart. Blockchain technology, which allows Bitcoin to function, is a system for storing data. Different chunks or “blocks” of data are stored on computers, which are linked to each other, creating a chain of information. The data blocks are locked so that only the owner of the data and anyone they’ve given access to can see them. In agriculture, many believe blockchain technology has the potential to make commodities trading more efficient, secure, and transparent for everyone involved from producer to consumer. “I’ve been in the food and agribusiness sector as a practitioner as well as an academic for nearly 30 years and I have never seen a piece of technology that has gone from such obscurity to center stage as I have...

According to a press release on the 25th of January 2018, the US based agricultural conglomerate, Cargill will be investing its digital engineering resources into the development of Hyperledger Grid. The grid is one of the most recent projects by Hyperledger that is geared towards streamlining the agricultural supply chain using Hyperledger’s blockchain technology . Cargill Invests In Blockchain Technology Cargill is currently the largest privately held firms in the United States. It has over $114.7 billion in revenue. The company has decided to speed up the development of the Hyperledger Grid which, in turn, will speed up the development of blockchain technology and many other digital technological solutions in the agricultural supply chain on a global scale. Bitcoin (BTC) Price Today – BTC / USD The company stated that the Hyperledger Grid provides the required tools for addressing the issues in the current supply chain. Things like food safety, traceability, and trade settle...

Tata Trusts and New America's Blockchain Trust Accelerator partner to launch blockchain blueprint for social innovation. Getty Last year, at the World Economic Forum, blockchain was one of the most widely cited words echoing through the alpine town of Davos. So much so that it signaled how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies were coming out of beta in 2018 . At this year’s gathering of the world’s elite, despite substantial political no-shows amounting to 50% of the world’s GDP and 42% of the world’s population, blockchain’s movement from hype to impact is pressing ahead. This time rather than so many short-lived cryptocurrency issuances, blockchain has found a new home in the social innovation arena and in the emergence of the digital state, which may be the technology’s most lasting impact on the world. In an ambitious project supported by Tata Trusts , India’s oldest philanthropy, carrying the eponymous name of the Tata family, and lead by New America’s Bloc...

A Chinese investor has sued a prominent Israeli crypto entrepreneur and his blockchain firm Stox ( STX ) over alleged fraud, English-language newspaper The Times of Israel reports Jan. 25. The investor, Zhewen Hu, is suing Stox and its founder for $4.6 million, according to the report. Hu allegedly invested a total of around $3.8 million worth of Ethereum ( ETH ) in the blockchain firm — an open source, Ethereum-based prediction market platform dubbed Stox, founded by Moshe Hogeg. Hogeg is well-known for his multiple cryptocurrency-related ventures — which include founding blockchain smartphone developer Sirin Labs , and serving as chairman of LeadCoin, a blockchain-based decentralized lead-sharing network. He is also the owner of Beitar Jerusalem, one of Israel’s top soccer clubs, having negotiated its purchase for $7.2 million last August, The Times of Israel reports The NIS 17 million lawsuit (~$4.6 million) alleges that Hogeg and Stox operator, STX Technologies Limited, mis...

Welcome to Hard Fork Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice to keep you up to date in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world. The governance of blockchains is one of the most fascinating, contentious , and difficult topics to master, but it’s one we must try to understand as the network’s ability to adapt, and the extent to which it may be able to do so, will be crucial for its future. When it comes to blockchain technology , the notion of governance is closely tied to the incentives or economics on which the network is based on. Governance also has a direct impact on how transactions will be processed. In this article, Hard Fork is going to look at on-chain governance, what it is, how it works, and why it’s necessary. What is it? On-chain governance describes the manner of proposing changes to a cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain by a certain set of processes, rather than a simple majority consensus. The core differences between blockchains can be h...

  Executive Summary Blockchain, like the internet, or democracy, or money, is many overlapping things. It is a decentralized record of cryptocurrency transactions. It is a peer-to-peer network of computers. It is an immutable, add-on-only database. What gets confusing is the way in which these overlapping functions override one definition or explanation of blockchain, only to replace it with an altogether different one. The conceptual overlaps are like glass lenses dropped on top of one another, scratching each other’s surface and confusing each other’s focal dimensions. This guide takes apart the stack of these conceptual lenses and addresses them one by one through the reconstruction of the basic elements of blockchain technology. The first section of this report gives a short history of blockchain, then describes its main functionality, distinguishing between private and public blockchains. Next, the guide breaks down the components and inner workings of a block and the block...