Deutsche Bank is responding to serious challenges for its survival. But they are certainly not alone. Massive layoffs can be expected across the banking industry.

Wow! I knew that it's bad but this is stinking bad, "Stories about ripping people off in the name of a cause are as old as the concept of charity itself." It is very damaging to many other legitimate charities. Unfortunately, where there is big money there are crooks.

This got to be the most significant project, in both size and scope, that I came across in our industry. I think that it makes a lot of sense and has huge potential.  "the creation of a secure messaging and transaction platform that permits “anyone anywhere the ability to send a secure message or conduct other transactions across multiple channels traceable in a decentralized ledger.”

Quite ironic. It implies secrecy with transparency!


"the agency believes that Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests (MIPR) could be implemented more securely. Regulators with access to the ledger could read the correspondence and thus easily verify that a MIPR transaction didn’t violate Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). The messaging platform could also act as the transport for a cyptographically sound record of all transactions whether they be MIPRs, contracts, troop movements or intelligence. Troops on the ground in denied communications environments would have a way to securely communicate back to headquarters, and US military’s back office executives could be confident that their logistics system is efficient, timely and safe from hackers."

DARPA Solicits Proposals for Blockchain-Based Messaging & Transaction Platform
April 26, 2016

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for the military and elsewhere, has issued a solicitation for the creation of a secure messaging and transaction platform that permits “anyone anywhere the ability to send a secure message or conduct other transactions across multiple channels traceable in a decentralized ledger.”

The agency issued the solicitation through the Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer small business portal.

DARPA wants the messaging platform to be able to transfer messages via a secure decentralized protocol that will be secured across multiple channels, including but not limited to a transport protocol, encryption of messages via various application protocols, customized blockchain implementation of message deconstruction and reconstruction, and decentralized ledger implementation.

With theplatform, DARPA hopes that the business logic of the US Department of Defense (DoD) ecosystem would be mapped onto a network of known entities using distributed ledgers. By doing this, the research agency thinks that significant portions of the US military backoffice infrastructure can be decentralized, ‘smart documents and contracts’ can be instantly and securely sent and received thereby reducing exposure to hackers and reducing needless delays in DoD backoffice correspondence.

Using such a secure ledger, the agency believes that Military Interdepartmental Purchase Requests (MIPR) could be implemented more securely. Regulators with access to the ledger could read the correspondence and thus easily verify that a MIPR transaction didn’t violate Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). The messaging platform could also act as the transport for a cyptographically sound record of all transactions whether they be MIPRs, contracts, troop movements or intelligence. Troops on the ground in denied communications environments would have a way to securely communicate back to headquarters, and US military’s back office executives could be confident that their logistics system is efficient, timely and safe from hackers.

The first phase of the project will be to create a specific decentralized messaging platform built on the framework of an existing blockchain framework. The goals of that phase include creating a model for the decentralized messaging platform, experimenting with encryption schemes, evaluating hardware to be used in combination with the messaging platform to provide additional security, and defining the product feature set from the application and platform perspectives and finally, developing a blueprint of the platform architecture mapped to DoD constructs.

The second phase of the project will be to develop, test and evaluate a working prototype with the following features:
• Decentralized back end blockchain implementation
• Data aggregation, reconstruction
• Data transport protocol implementation
• End user application implementation (alpha)
• Conduct simulated MIPR transactions using the decentralized ledger
• Allow transparent regulatory review of DoD legal findings and contracts
• Significant reduction in time for regulatory overview of various transactions
• Tracking of aircraft or satellites with simulated telemetry or air traffic control data
• System admin and monitoring tools and engine
• Integration of hardware or edge of network hardware components

The third phase of the project will focus on commercialization and full-scale implementation of the platform. This will involve converting the alpha of the end user application into a beta application and increasing user testing and platform monitoring and industrializing the back-end platform in terms of decentralized ledger architecture and blockchain implementation.

Questions asked by interested parties in the DARPA solicitation include whether non-US based institutions or companies could apply, and that the criteria for “time to live/self delete for messages” proposed by DARPA is impossible to achieve with a blockchain. Responses from the agency to these questions are still pending.

Source:
http://blockchain-finance.com/2016/04/26/darpa-solicits-proposals-for-blockchain-based-messaging-transaction-platform/

Excellent article, Brandon. We look forward to the day when DNotes can provide significant help to make a big difference in charity fund raising inefficiencies.

That sounds great. It seems like there is more leadership pushing FinTech and digital currencies in Canada than in the US.

Excellent article, Chase. Very informative and compelling. We are passionately committed to help small business owners and their employees. I trust that before too much longer, many more people will realize that we are not just talking about. We have been building the whole support system to make it happen.

Here is a good list of Blockchain Applications.

Blockchain Applications Beyond the Financial Services Industry
April 26, 2016     By : Sofia

Blockchain fever hasn’t been limited to financial institutions. Along with banks and FinTech startups, non-financial players have been paying attention and looking for ways to leverage the opportunities that distributed ledger technology opens. Let’s look at some interesting examples of the non-financial applications of blockchain technology.

Blockchain and commodities
The Real Asset Company enables individuals around the world to buy gold and silver bullion securely and efficiently. The company’s investor-friendly platform sits on top of global vaulting infrastructure, providing an online account for buying gold and silver and holding precious metals. Goldbloc, the company’s gold-backed cryptocurrency adds an additional layer of transparency and control to users’ gold investment. Backed by one gram of gold, the company believes its cryptocurrency to be the first step to bringing gold back into the monetary system.

Uphold is a platform for moving, converting , transacting and holding any form of money or commodity. The company connects banks, credit and debit cards and bitcoin to digital wallets for free financial services and transactions. Businesses and consumers can fund their Uphold accounts via bank transfer or by linking a credit/debit card in addition to bitcoin.

Blockchain and diamonds
The diamond industry is one of the biggest natural resource industries and makes a substantial part of the GDP in African countries and other major diamond-miners. The hallmark of the industry is that it is highly criminalized. Stones are small and easy to hide and transport. The best part for criminals is that transactions can be made confidentially and the sell returns the value over years. Diamonds are known to be involved in money laundering and financing of terrorism on a truly massive scale around the world.

Due to a range of challenges with diamonds business, one of the tech pioneers in the sphere isEverledger. The company provides an immutable ledger for diamond identification and transaction verification for various stakeholders, from insurance companies to claimants and law enforcement agencies. Everledger assigns a “digital passport” to each diamond that will accompany each stone as it is transacted and creates a unique fingerprint.

Blockchain and data management
Factom is one of the most notable blockchain companies applying distributed ledger to the non-financial market – in this case, data management. The company uses blockchain-based identity ledgers in database management and data analytics to support various applications.Businesses and governments can use Factom to simplify records management, record business processes, and address security and compliance issues. Factom maintains a permanent, time-stamped record of data in the blockchain that allows companies to reduce the cost and complexity of conducting audits, managing records, and complying with government regulations.

Blockchain and cannabis
Serica is one of the examples of a blockchain companies in the cannabis industry. Serica brings software engineering, cryptofinance, financial custody and blockchain technology to traditional custodian finance. It allows entrepreneurs to establish their business legitimacy through the largest network of verified customers in order to grow conversions, registrations, memberships and average order sizes. Serica’s Secure Socket Layering Technology encrypts all communications between a user’s personal wallet and Serica. Serica uses the blockchain in order to track and record every purchase of medical marijuana, providing businesses an easy way to accept payments online.
There are also companies like Tokken, Hypur and others leveraging bitcoin and blockchain in cash-heavy businesses like legal marijuana. Read more here.

Blockchain and digital content
Ascribe helps artists and creators to attribute digital art via blockchain. Ascribe’s marketplace allows to generate digital editions with a unique ID and a digital certificate of authenticity to prove provenance and authenticity. It also allows to accept consignments from artists and transfer digital works to collectors with all the terms and legals.
There are also companies like Bitproof, Blockai, Stampery and other companies applying blockchain to digital art attribution and authentication.

Blockchain and network infrastructure
Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications. Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of most kinds, intellectual property, and even smart property thanks to hardware integration.

ChromaWay offers blockchain as a platform for financial institutions and is working on a smart contract platform that allows for digitizing and representing workflows in a secure, private and efficient way.

Blockchain in market forecasting

Augur.net is an open-source, decentralized market prediction platform built on etherum blockchain. It allows users to trade on the outcome of events, and for the market to then leverage that crowdsourced information. Augur plans to use decentralized public ledgers to create a way for anyone in any field, from finance, healthcare and governance, to tap into the collective forecasting power of a global user base.

Source: http://letstalkpayments.com/blockchain-applications-beyond-the-financial-services-industry/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=linkedin

TeeGee and Mark. I do believe that there are merits. Personally, I prefer a shorter article (closer to 5 page) and written in such a way that is easy for the laypersons to understand.

I am going to be extremely busy this week and may not be able to contribute much. The book is 100% written, pending a final round of edit. We have decided to add a "Chapter Summation: Key Takeaways"

Mark, you often bring about great prospective from a different angle. I appreciate that.

Creative accounting is nothing new, especially with quarterly reports. Annual reports must be submitted with certified audited returns. The consequences of "Fantasy Math" are very serious. While it happened, the headline is clearly to garner attention. The reporting and compliance requirements with SEC as a publicly traded company is extremely high. Coupled with massive legal liabilities Board members these days are significantly more watchful. So are auditors.

Mark, though I am more of an independent thinker - a big picture person, I understand your frustration:

"I am sorely tempted to return to my very very first crypto inclination: to write its political theory. We seem to be rushing past a never-got-achieved anarcho-capitalism towards an anarcho-techno-dystopia."

Sometimes we could be "too smart" for our own good and fail to exploit what we already have. To me the most ingenious creation about Bitcoin is bitcoin itself - the digital currency. The currency potential is huge if a lot of the associated challenges and problems can be resolved. The under-pining blockchain technology has great utility value and should be exploited. Our industry, as a group, is all over the place. It 's a common mistake, as explained in the book:

Quote: The Four Pillars of Business Success - Chapter 11 - Products:

"One of the mistakes I commonly see involves new entrepreneurs - flush with excitement and filled with a seemingly endless supply of bright ideas- who spent all their time developing new products, even at the expense of cannibalizing their old offerings. They are engaged in what I like to refer to as a “build and destroy” strategy. That path leads to nowhere fast. And you can go bankrupt doing it.

Do not build and destroy. Whenever you create a new product, focus your energies on exploiting it to its fullest so that you can maximize its potential and achieve an optimal return on your investment with the best possible sales revenue and profitability. Any time you abandon efforts to increase your ROI from a product, you must be sure that it has reached its maximum potential already. If it has not, then you are failing to fully take advantage of your prior efforts, and essentially denying yourself revenue just for the sake of trying something new."

I agree. The opportunities are not limited to Bitcoin but it does not mean that we have to replace it. It is good to have competition and there is plenty of room for other altcoins to be quite successful.

I do believe that a combination of software and hardware will provide the best path to virtually no constraint to blockchain scaling with almost unbreakable security and instant transaction confirmation. However, this is not likely to happen until there is large scale acceptance.

Intel Conducting Experiments to Massively Scale Blockchain
Sid Kalla | Published on April 21, 2016 at 16:52 BST

Intel, the largest chip-maker in the world, is looking to trusted execution environments on its hardware chips to enhance security and privacy for blockchain users.

Speaking at the Tomorrow’s Transactions conference in London this week, Kelly Olson, director of the distributed ledger technology group at Intel, discussed ways it is possible to use a "secure enclave", similar to what Apple uses for its Touch ID, to increase blockchain security.

Olson's group is conducting research on large-scale deployments of blockchains that could scale to several tens of thousands or millions of nodes, though he said the work is still in early stages.

Still, Olson made the case for using secure hardware solutions that can provide a trusted computation environment. The immediate use case of such a hardware solution would be for key management in blockchains.

Discussing bitcoin specifically, Olson noted that even though the public blockchain network itself has been very secure, users have experienced losses due to lost or stolen private keys.

Olson said:
"While initial blockchain deployments like bitcoin have proven to be quite secure, they have shifted the burden of security from the network to the endpoints that write to the blockchain."

Olson discussed the use of such a secured hardware computing environment not just in security, but also privacy.

The goal is to bring privacy to the blockchain without centralization, he said, which could prove a difficult task. One proposed solution is to treat the hardware itself as a trusted third-party that can provide a level of verification that is generally either publicly distributed or privately validated.
“Privacy is one of the most difficult problems to solve, as transaction validation and transparency often go hand in hand," he said.

Intel experiments
Olson also offered new insights into the blockchain experiments ongoing in Intel's labs.
For example, he said that his team has been working on using blockchains that can be highly customized, where users could change the consensus mechanism of the blockchain or impose participation restrictions.

However, the main differentiating factor between what Intel is working on and what startups like R3 have shown, he said, is scale.

According to Olson, his tests indicate that traditional distributed consensus mechanisms like RAFTdon’t scale well beyond 100 nodes or so. However, Intel is looking at cases where the blockchain might scale to potentially millions of nodes.

In order to scale the blockchain sufficiently, he suggested the use of ‘sharding’, a technique that is also being actively explored by Ethereum, although Intel’s implementation may be different.
The idea is to partition the data in such a way that strict ordering of events is not essential, unless there is a specific use case, and therefore these 'chains' can be separated out and run in parallel.
Future of Blockchain

Finally, Olson touched on the evolution of blockchain and its use cases, which he divided into three broad phases.

The first, he said, is a currency application, like bitcoin; the second lies in the creation of digital assets; and the third centers around identity and reputation.

Notably, it was identity and reputation management that was the use case that Olson believes will provide the most value to the end consumers.

But while he acknowledged the potential of this technology, he warned that the industry needs to be pragmatic. He believes distributed ledger technology is still being worked out today, and is not appropriate for the enterprise as it now stands. He was also skeptical about the use of blockchain technology in financial clearing and settlement anytime soon, given the kinds of regulations that are required in the industry.

When asked by a member of the audience about the first real use case of blockchain technology, Olson said that he believes it will, in fact, not be in the financial industry.

Instead, he believes it is more likely that some sort of digital asset being represented on the blockchain is more likely the case, such as tickets to a game, or online-only tokens such as in-game credits.
Source:

http://www.coindesk.com/intel-hardware-security-blockchains/

Frankly, this industry is making a lot of things much more complicated and confusing than it needs to be. If we don't make a serious effort to keep things simple the likelihood of mass acceptance of Bitcoin and other digital currencies is remote. And that is what the bankers are hoping will happen.

Excellent. Let us know how we can help in the future.

You are most welcome batesresearch. We are delighted to support our industry when can. We are very fortunate that Chris was able to represent us at CoinFestUK. I understand that his presentation was well received. We thank you all for the opportunity and a job well done.

There may be some confusion over anonymity with privacy. We all want our full rights to privacy and the banks are obligated to protect our privacy. To me that is not surprising, unless someone got confused with anonymity, which I don’t believe will be acceptable in the highly regulated banking and financial services environment.

I understand, infovortice. The majority of people worldwide struggle to pay bills, take care of their  children and put food on the table. Most of them do not have a choice, but spend their entire life working.

That is unfortunate, Mark. I know that you have been supporting them. That is part of the reason why we want to take our time in building a solid foundation first. We will never be short of things to do, but once we made a commitment, we want to be able to stand by it. We will have our own exchange one day, but it will not be anytime soon.

 

What a sad headline.
It will be nice if DNotes can help to lower this statistic by a few points one day.


NEARLY HALF OF AMERICANS WOULD HAVE TROUBLE FINDING $400 TO PAY FOR AN EMERGENCY


SINCE 2013, THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.

I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

Read more:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/