Excellent press release!! 

Digital Currency Weekly Recap 5-1-2016

The New UK Treasury Action Plan to Regulate Exchanges
UK Treasury to Exempt Digital Currency Wallets from AML Rules
EU Vote Means Crypto Exchange AML Policy Closer to Reality
Isle of Man Seeks Rules Tweak to Facilitate Cryptocurrency Gambling
New Japanese Banking Legislation Would Equate Digital Currencies to Fiat Currency

http://dcebrief.com/digital-currency-weekly-recap-5-1-2016/

There have been all kinds of use cases for blockchain. Frankly, a lot of them are on the borderline of being silly. However, using "blockchain technology to the human resources industry to increase transparency and fight fraud in HR credentials" could have merits. I have some interesting ideas alone those line. Like any big bold ideas there are challenges must be addressed successfully.  

Ascribe Forms Alliance with Japan HR Firm Recruit Tech to Test Blockchain for HR

Hans Lombardo
April 27, 2016

German blockchain startup Ascribe and Japan-based human resources tech firm Recruit Technologies have formed a strategic alliance to bring blockchain technology to the human resources industry to increase transparency and fight fraud in HR credentials.

Recruit Tech, a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings Co. – a major information services and human resources company in Japan, will leverage Ascribe’s web service to develop blockchain-backed cryptographic Certificates of Authenticity. To overcome scalability issues with traditional blockchains, Recruit Tech will also be using BigchainDB, a scalable blockchain database developed by the Ascribe team.

The goal of these tests is to examine the possibilities and practical uses of how blockchain technology can be applied to the human resources sector and develop a prototype resume authentication database for job hunters.

Osamu Yonetani, CTO of Recruit Technologies, stated:

“With a resume authentication database, the verification of official certificates and contracts, which have until now been typically done on paper, could be carried out using the blockchain database. As a result, the effort of collecting multiple official certificates would be reduced for those searching for jobs. The companies being applied to could also handle confidential official certificates safely and without worry of misrepresentation.”

The two partners hope the result of these efforts will encourage data-sharing among different institutions and allow for data-mining based fraud detection. Record credentials will be stored on the blockchain and tamper-proof Certificates of Authenticity will be generated via digital signatures. While HR is being used a pilot use case, the intention is for Recruit Tech to leverage this technology across the many different industries Recruit Holdings Co. works with.

HR is one industry where fraud manifests in forged or altered documentation including completely fabricated documents like school credentials or previous employment records. Another common example is foreign documents that are mistranslated, improperly representing the original or completely changing their context.

Bruce Pon, CEO of ascribe, noted:

“This type of fraud is common worldwide. With blockchain technology, an institution can issue a degree to a student in a cryptographically secure, immutable, public fashion. By leveraging this technology, Recruit Technologies will find a way to address a variety of fraud issues, greatly reducing fraud on a large scale and in turn benefiting their customers.”

Source: http://allcoinsnews.com/2016/04/27/ascribe-forms-alliance-with-japan-hr-firm-recruit-tech-to-test-blockchain-for-hr/

Digital Currency Weekly Recap 4-24-2016

French Central Bank Report Recommends Increased Tracking of Cryptocurrency
Unconfirmed Leak Suggests Russian Duma to Host Crypto Conference in June
Private Testnet for Rootstock to Begin Soon
EDCAB Hosts Roundtable Discussions on Digital Currency
CGI Group Adds Ripple to Intelligent Gateway

http://dcebrief.com/digital-currency-weekly-recap-4-24-2016/

No it won't. One of the key advantages of cryptocurrencies is anyone, anywhere in the world is able to participate.

Just for your reference:


How 420,000 might be bitcoin’s magic number
Daniel Masters
Director at Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund Plc.

Apr 20, 201621 views2 Likes0 CommentsShare on LinkedInShare on FacebookShare on Twitter
28th November 2012 was a slow news day. There was a lunar eclipse -- the second that year -- and it was the first day since 1990 that the NYPD reported that no one was shot, stabbed or slashed in New York.  There wasn’t much to report. And while journalists around the World searched for a scoop one small story went uncovered – the reward for mining a block on the bitcoin blockchain had just halved.

 Commencing in January 9th 2009 when the Bitcoin blockchain initiated, each and every one of the 209,999 blocks mined, created at a rate of approximately one every ten minutes, in an uninterrupted 24/7/365 operation, had attracted a new, autonomous creation by the network itself of 50 new, never before seen, bitcoin.

 A lot had changed since 2009. The first block mined had 1 transaction (the special “coinbase” transaction that captures the reward) and no other activity. By 2012 the network size and activity had grown significantly and there were 543 transactions in the “pre-halving” block.

 The next block mined, at a height of precisely 210,000 blocks, as codified years earlier by Satoshi Nakamoto, had a 25 bitcoin reward.

 So what?

 Nothing much happened. However, a few months later the value of a bitcoin had increased dramatically. Prices had been steadily increasing as the halving approached, they ended 2011 at $7, and rose to $11 by September, 2012.

 The high tick by April 2013 was $259.

 Needless to say bitcoin has demonstrated stomach-churning volatility in the past and this meteoric rise met with considerable turbulence. None of this may in fact have had anything to do with the halving, it’s impossible to determine that one way or the other. But even so, there had certainly been an extraordinary chance to profit.

 So now we look forward to the next pre-ordained halving, at a block height of precisely 420,000. We sit at 408,138 at the time of writing, with the next halving expected on or around 11th July 2016. At that moment the 25 coin per block reward halves again, to 12.5

 It is interesting to think about whether we will see another price rise following this next event. I’m confident that there won’t be fireworks on the day itself, and indeed there is some prospect that prices will rise in advance of the event, fully discounting the effect ahead of time. I don’t see that happening currently.

 At this moment the value of all bitcoin in circulation is $6.7 billion. At the old rate of issuance, that puts $575m of new coin in circulation per year. Prices so far in 2016 have been relatively stable. That tells me that there is enough new investment and real time demand to match the creation of $575m new coin. It seems obvious that if that dollar-sized demand persists, which I believe it will, that the price of bitcoin must rise to meet it.

 Naysayers and haters will say -- in addition to the normal criticism of bitcoin -- that a drop of $288m per year in supply is not meaningful when compared to the $6.7 billion inventory.

 That’s not how commodities work.

 Just think about what happened recently in the oil market. Taking the USA alone we now have more oil and refined products in inventory than since records began, over 2 billion barrels. Yet the price of oil has risen 60% from the $25 low point early in the year.

 OPEC has hinted that the oil production introduced to the market will no longer rise. This will do very little indeed to change the inventory picture. It will remain engorged. So why the massive rally?

 Because commodities price on the rate of change of inventory, not on inventory.

 When bitcoin dipped in price in June 2015 I stated passionately prices couldn’t remain in the 200’s https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/elliptic-curves-fermat-bitcoin-daniel-masters?trk=mp-author-card

 I’m equally convinced that today, a price of $440 is, once again,  too low.


Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-420000-might-bitcoins-magic-number-daniel-masters?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST

Blockchain Weekly Recap 4-16-2016

R3 CEV Unveils Eight PoCs at New York Conference
TransActive Grid Brings Energy to the Blockchain
EU Parliament to Host Blockchain Tech Conference
Bitcoin/Blockchain Meetup Slated for Belarus
Standards Australia Sends Proposed Blockchain Standards to ISO
Life.SREDA’s Banking on Blockchain Fund Targets Mid-Size Financial Companies
Fed’s Brainard Strikes Positive Note on Blockchain

http://dcebrief.com/blockchain-weekly-recap-4-16-2016/

Noted and shared on every social media site I have an account for.

I will take these coins along with other ones mentioned and add them to a list to research at my earliest convenience, so thanks. And no, I wouldn't dream of blaming you if I decided to invest in one or more and it went sour--that's my responsibility.

One I happened to notice yesterday is Creditbit. Does anyone have an opinion about that one? Nice website and 8% minting rate, but that's all I know at this point.

More on OpenBazaar:

Introducing OB1

JUN 11, 2015

We have said many times that we believe in emergent, decentralized, start-up innovation. Institutions public and private, no matter how well intentioned, tend to protect their institutional interests, whether is it a current revenue stream, or a position of market power. That makes them inherently conservative. Start-ups and the entrepreneurs who create them are almost always outsiders. They depend entirely on innovation for success. So we are sensitive to market power and constantly on the look out for innovations that unlock markets by creating value for consumers and changing the structure of markets.

We bet on networks like Twitter and Tumblr because they efficiently connected creators and consumers challenging the incumbent bureaucratic hierarchies in the media industry. But those networks also concentrate market power through network effects and as they grow, they tend to consolidate control over their creators and consumers in an effort to extract more economic value. This is capitalism’s creative destruction at work. We celebrate it, but we also look for opportunities to continue the process with new models, that are even more efficient.

That interest in what’s next has led us to look closely at protocols that further flatten hierarchies and decentralize control. We are pleased to announce, today, our investment in OB1.

OB1 is a company formed to further the development of OpenBazaar, an open source project that is refining a protocol that will enable anyone, anywhere to sell products and services to anyone, anywhere in a fully decentralized marketplace. Because the marketplace is defined by a protocol and distributed across every participant’s server, the hosting costs are shared and there is no way for a central authority to leverage network effect market power to extract rents from the participants.

This begs the question of how OB1 can be a for profit business that will generate a return on the investment we are announcing today. How can a business that is consciously architected to undo network effect defensibility, one that is tearing down the walls and filling in the moats that every paper on market based competition has insisted are necessary for success… succeed. To paraphrase the old EF Hutton ad (yes I am dating myself), they intend to make money the old fashioned way: they intend to earn it.

OB1 will offer a set of value added services to buyers and sellers on the OpenBazaar market. They expect others to provide services to the participants on OpenBazaar, and they don’t expect to have any proprietary advantage over those competitors. As investors, we hope that their familiarity with the marketplace and the goodwill they generate as early sponsors of the open source project will give them an advantage but we understand they must execute very well or be left behind.

A close observer might say that the recent experience with decentralization is that it often leads to an unanticipated re-aggregation that creates extraordinary market power and financial returns. This is certainly the story of the TCP/IP and HTTP protocols that are the foundation of the Internet. Those protocols radically decentralized the creation and distribution of media and fundamentally changed the structure of the media industry. But the challenge in this newly decentralized world was discovery. When media was defined by distribution, the newspaper, radio station or cable franchise decided what was available to you. In a world where anything was available, the hard problem was finding what you want. The answer was search. And Google, whether they fully understood it or not, stepped in to meet that need and reaggregated human attention is a way that created an enormous amount of market value.

A cynic might then say that OB1, is consciously architected to create this same reaggregation opportunity in commerce. I can say with some conviction, having talked about this for hours with the founders of OB1 that this is not their plan. But I also have to say that none of us understand exactly how discovery will work in a fully decentralized marketplace and how to prevent discovery from becoming a source of market power in the decentralized world we envision. We hope by calling it out here, you will keep us honest and help us imagine a new model for discovery that won’t subvert the goal of empowering buyers and sellers to trade freely and to capture the value they create.

Finally, we can’t end this post without addressing the potential dark side of decentralized markets. Decentralization empowers individual participants in the network or marketplace. Some may use the protocol in ways that others consider immoral or that are illegal in some jurisdictions. That should, however, not prevent us from creating an open protocol. TCP/IP and HTTP, for instance, allow content to be shared between any two people who have access to the Internet. Some of that content is morally reprehensible to many if not most people. Some of that content is illegal.

Still overall, most would argue that society is better off because the Internet has enabled everyone to connect and communicate. The Internet could have been designed to centralize control, but then it would not have enabled the permissionless innovation that led to so many of the services we now use every day. The OpenBazaar protocol makes the same conscious design choice. It is inherently decentralized. It favors innovation over control, so it is possible that the openness of the protocol could lead to use cases that some or most of us would disagree with. But as with TCP/IP and HTTP, we believe the creative and legitimate use cases will quickly dominate the marketplace.

OB1 will, of course, not knowingly offer its value added services to anyone using the OpenBazaar protocol to engage in illegal activities. The trickier question is how OB1 supports the development of an open protocol, one that they do not control, without encouraging, or endorsing, or even facilitating the misuse of that protocol. This calculus is further complicated by the fact that many current contributors to the open source project may be motivated by a mistrust of political or economic power. We do not have an easy answer. It would be disingenuous for us to say the OB1 team has no influence over the open source project.

They are respected code contributors. They are likely to encourage the development of the protocol through their own work and will now be in a position to offer bounties to encourage the development of specific features. But we can’t think of any design principle we could encourage, that would eliminate the possibility of misuse, without undermining the value inherent in a free and open marketplace, so the best we can do is aggressively advocate for the responsible use of the OpenBazaar protocol, be open and transparent ourselves, and be an example for others.

USV and our syndicate partners at A16Z are committed to responsibly furthering the OpenBazaar protocol. We are excited to be working with the team at OB1 who we know shares our values and that commitment.

Source: https://www.usv.com/blog/introducing-ob1

Blockchain Weekly Recap 4-2-2016

Smart Contracts Firm Among Eight Startups Chosen for L’Atelier Accelerator
HyperLedger Inches Closer to Codebase Merge
Deloitte to Serve as Title Sponsor for Consensus 2016
French National Assembly Blockchain Conference Examines Blockchain Impact
SEC Currently Exploring Blockchain Regulation

http://dcebrief.com/blockchain-weekly-recap-4-2-2016/

uᴉoɔʇᴉq Weekly Recap 4-1-2016

Cornell Institute Study on Block Size Scaling Yields Interesting Results
Excel 2016 to Support uᴉoɔʇᴉq Format
Putin Advisor Calls uᴉoɔʇᴉq a Virus
First Arab uᴉoɔʇᴉq Community Launched: AskBitcoiner
Needham & Company Report: uᴉoɔʇᴉq Considerably Undervalued
Coinkite Reveals Plans for Disposable uᴉoɔʇᴉq Wallet

http://dcebrief.com/

It has been a lot of hard work but I am very happy with how things have been coming together, thanks to many from our community who have been giving me a great deal of help.

The book is a significant foundation block for DNotes. Once you get to read the DNotes Story - Chapter 15, as narrated by "TeeGee", you will get a much clearer picture of the DNotes' Vision and the amazing journal ahead. DNotes is a currency with a purpose. Our journal just began.

This is a pretty good article, worth the read, from Marcus Swanepoel is the CEO of BitX, Why Bitcoin’s Bad Reputation is in the Eye of the Beholder

As an industry insider, it is sometimes very hard to admit that bitcoin suffers from serious negative perception issues: that in the minds of many people bitcoin is still automatically linked to thoughts of drugs, terrorist financing and money laundering.

Needless to say, this has massive implications for all potential stakeholders: It slows down consumer adoption, it has regulators set the bar unreasonably high for bitcoin companies to operate and many banks still refuse to provide bitcoin companies with simple operating accounts.

All of this results in the stifling of innovation, the creation of an unfair competitive environment, and ultimately, a negative connotation for the consumer who is meant to reap the benefits of this new and useful technology.

We’ve spent enough time with all these stakeholders to reasonably assert that most of these concerns are driven by perception and emotion, rather than facts and data. Are there risks around bitcoin? Yes, of course – they exist in all financial systems.

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