Showing posts with label blockchain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blockchain. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Attended Foreign Policy Seminar On Crypto

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Monday, September 16, 2019

Libra And The "Global" Financial System







Will Facebook’s Libra Change the Way the World Banks? The Templars were originally a Catholic military order that took up residence in Jerusalem, where they pledged to protect Christian pilgrims. They created the economic infrastructure for the Crusades, writing promissory notes in France or England that were redeemable in the Levant. A cipher based on the shape of the cross ostensibly guaranteed the notes’ security. In other words, the Templars created a variant on modern international transfer services, five hundred years before the first central bank......... Today, the demand mounts for a similar system, but on a global scale. Billions of people have no access to banks. Countless others endure high fees and slow transactions, especially when sending money across borders. What we consider a global financial system is, in reality, hardly global. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank of International Settlements, and the Financial Stability Board provide little more than a multilateral veneer over relationships that are primarily bilateral and dominated by commercial and central banks. Even within borders, moving money involves costly processes of settlement and exchange........... A blockchain-type network creates a public ledger, a universally trustworthy account of who owes what. Just as the Templar cipher verified an otherwise forgeable piece of paper, cryptography will ensure that Libra cannot be spent twice or otherwise duplicated. Such technologically guaranteed, artificial scarcity allows cryptocurrencies to operate as money........ Libra will be redeemable at a fixed price for certain established currencies (such as dollars, euros, and yen). Members of the association will deposit assets in the Libra Reserve as backing any time someone wants to buy more Libra. As a result, whereas Bitcoin fluctuates wildly in value, Libra should remain relatively stable. That stability makes Libra potentially useful not only as a store of value but as a medium of exchange. Users will, Facebook argues, be able to send money around the world as easily as they send messages and videos........ In addition to banking the unbanked, Libra could replace traditional intermediaries in cross-border transactions, such as remittances, which amount to more than $600 billion per year. Libra could also end up reducing the power of central banks in countries with weak currencies or strong capital controls, because it will allow people to move their money out of these countries more easily. ......... Facebook is already in the crosshairs of governments around the world, and the stakes are nothing less than the stability of the global economy....... Much of the current financial system is antiquated below the surface. ........ The country with the most to lose from Libra also has the most to gain from a revolution in the global financial system. That country is China. China bans Facebook and forbids trading in cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) that could circumvent its capital controls. China is also home to the world’s biggest digital payments systems. WeChatPay and AliPay together process as many transactions in a day as the United States does in nine months. They operate only with China’s own currency, the renminbi, and they are centrally controlled, which makes payments easy for the government to access or limit. Facebook’s argument to regulators is that if an American company doesn’t move aggressively into blockchain-based payments, China will. The truth is that Facebook’s entry has accelerated China’s movement in this direction.........

No country is more interested than China in displacing American hegemony over global financial institutions. Cryptocurrency serves that objective.

........ There is also the IMF, whose director, Christine Lagarde, has already hinted at a possible “IMFcoin” based on the IMF-sponsored assets known as Special Drawing Rights......... Money transfer helped the order become one of the wealthiest institutions in medieval Europe—a sprawling financial empire and powerful creditor to kings. After the crusaders were pushed out of the Levant, however, the Templars languished. And then the order collapsed abruptly at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

The French King Philip IV, deeply in debt to the Templars, arrested and tortured many of its members on trumped-up charges of heresy. He eventually convinced the pope to ban the order, coincidentally canceling his debts.

The Templars’ power and wealth were their undoing. Facebook should take heed.




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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

The Blockchain

30-30-30-10: A More Thoughtful And Egalitarian Formula For Equity Distribution In Tech Startups For The Age Of Abundance
The Blockchain: Fundamental Like The Internet
The Blockchain Rumble
The Character Called The Tech Entrepreneur

TED is like the Digital Davos.












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Friday, August 02, 2019

Digitisation Of The Supply Chain




Digitisation is helping to deliver goods faster Machines are replacing humans in prediction and planning ...... Digitisation will have the impact on supply chains that steam and electricity had on manufacturing”

That steam/electricity metaphor is not hyperbolic. If anything, it is an understatement.



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Monday, July 29, 2019

Ray Youssef Talks Wisdom









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Friday, July 26, 2019

Blockchaining Entire Industries

No industry has been spared the Internet. No industry will be spared the Blockchain.




How Blockchain Will Change Construction Blockchain technology is among the most disruptive forces of the past decade. Blockchain’s power to record, enable, and secure huge numbers and varieties of transactions raises an intriguing question: can the same distributed ledger technology that powers bitcoin also enable better execution of strategic projects in a conservative sector like construction, involving large teams of contractors and subcontractors and an abundance of building codes, safety regulations, and standards? ....... set up a blockchain-enabled project management system to make the building development lifecycle more efficient. .. registering transactions at legally binding moments, where accuracy and an audit trail are essential .. “Blockchain provides a platform for clearly cascading work products down the chain and holding everyone accountable for completing key tasks” ....... The system’s benefits include timely information, unambiguous communication, and fewer mistakes. ... They also develop trust, which reduces friction in their mutual business processes. “Stakeholders spend more time discussing creative design and building method options.” ..... 95 percent of building construction data currently gets lost on handover to the first owner ...... the potential to capture and secure a construction project’s documentation in a blockchain ledger that parties can navigate and give to the owner as a deliverable. ...... The blockchain-encoded specifications are granular—paint colors, ceiling fixtures, LED bulbs, door hardware—plus manuals, warranties, and service life in a countdown clock that building owners can monitor. ........ building owners get a living ledger of everything that has happened with the building. ..... “But the industry is very relationship based. There are many family-owned firms and private companies. The selection of contractors and subcontractors can be based on relationships that have existed for decades.” ...... While the fundamentals of project management will remain important, blockchain enables managers to focus their talents on solving problems and achieving better project outcomes.



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The Crypto Crash Is Coming


The Blockchain People

The dot com boom happened on Nasdaq. The crypto boom is not there. The crypto boom is happening in the fact that there are more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies in play right now. This is crazy.

Crypto was supposed to simplify things. In the old world, we have about 200 national currencies. In the new crypto world, we have more than 2,000. This is not simpler.

When a cryptocurrency crashes, everyone who bought into it with real money will stand to lose that money. Most of these more than 2,000 will crash and burn. A lot of people will lose a lot of money.

This seems to happen with every new technology. When cars first showed up, there were thousands of car companies. Most of them went out of business. A handful survived.

Less than five of the more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies might survive. Three of them might be Bitcoin, Ethereum and Libra.

How will a cryptocurrency blow up? Loss of computing power is one way. A cryptocurrency needs hardware, it needs electricity, it needs computing power. When you are no longer growing, you start shrinking, and when you start shrinking, the end is near.

Another way would be for the founders to simply disappear. These would be fraudulent people who always meant to create a frenzy and cash out before anyone found out what was going on.

As to when the clean-up might happen is anyone's guess. It might be five years. Who knows?

One form of the crypto crash would be where the vast majority of the more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies are no longer around. 1990 gone, 10 still around kind of scenario.

Another form of the crash would be where say Bitcoin loses 90% of its value. So Bitcoin is still around. But it has lost most of its value. And then it starts its slow climb up. It was always real. And it will stick around. But its dollar value was way up than it needed to be. "Miners" get rewarded for computing power. If the next generation of computers is vastly more powerful and vastly cheaper, that might impact the Bitcoin price. Or not. If the use of Bitcoin just keeps getting larger and larger as computers and electricity get cheaper and cheaper, that dramatic crash might not even happen.

The Bitcoin is an incentive to build the Blockchain, the ledger. People are being rewarded for building the Blockchain.

Could the major cryptocurrencies talk to each other? The way your Gmail talks to Yahoo Mail and to Hotmail? They have to. If all the cryptocurrencies will talk to the real world currencies like the dollar, then obviously they also have to talk to each other. That might bring some stability.

Market corrections will inevitably happen. As to when and what forms they will talk is anyone's guess.














































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