Tag Archives: Blockchain

On Bloomberg view, Matt Levine discusses the recent bitcoin fork. The handling of long and short positions on Bitfinex, a bitcoin exchange, created an arbitrage opportunity, until Bitfinex changed its mind. Bitfinex announced a policy to deal with the fork, people took advantage of the policy, and Bitfinex changed its mind after the fact. Each of its decisions was rational, and quite plausibly the fairest option available to it. None of those decisions were required by, like, the nature...

In the Trustlines Network every user is acting as a bank by granting credit lines to friends they trust. This allows to issue people powered money between friends and facilitate secure payments between strangers, by sending payments along a chain of trusting friends. Think of IOUs or cheques and netting in the blockchain.

In the FT, Martin Arnold reports about a new cross-border payment method tested by the Bank of England. The “interledger” program transfers money “near-instantaneously and without settlement risk.” The Bank of England set up two simulated RTGS systems on a cloud computing platform, using the Ripple interledger to simultaneously process “a successful cross-border payment”. This is not necessarily good news for the blockchain community. The Bank of England’s proof of concept is “about...

On Alphaville, Izabella Kaminska comments on the pecking order induced by initial coin offerings (ICOs). All of this raises an important point about actual shareholder rights within these structures. Say a legally-incorporated institution with actual shareholders dishes out an uncapped amount of tokens promising a share of revenues or dividends via the ICO process. Do shareholders’ rights to those revenue/dividends trump rights of the token holders? And if so, how does that square with...

The Economist reports about government initiatives aimed at using blockchain technology in the public sector. Possible uses include land registries, identity-management systems, health-care records, or elections. Proponents expect the technology to improve efficiency and transparency and foster trust. Adoption requires significant investments. According to a survey “nine in ten government organisations say they plan to invest in blockchain technology to help manage financial transactions,...

On the FT’s Alphaville blog, Izabella Kaminska points to a paper by Italian academics arguing that the Ethereum technology tends to incubate Ponzi schemes. The uniqueness of the “smart Ponzi” is its capacity to protect the identity of the initiator but also its ability to persist even after being exposed. Since contracts are unmodifiable and thus unstoppable there is no central authority to terminate the execution of the scheme or force the initiator to refund victims. What’s more, the...

On the FT’s Alphaville blog, Izabella Kaminska questions the value of decentralization (and thus, blockchain technology) in intermediation. Decentralisation is, in almost all cases, not an efficiency. To the contrary, it’s a cost that adds complexity and creates an unnecessary burden for both users and operators unless centralised layers are added on top of it — defying the whole point. … At the end of the day, there are only two groups of people prepared to go to costly lengths to...

Digital Gold On The Blockchain – For Now Caveat Emptor – Bitcoin surpasses gold price – a psychological and arbitrary headline  – Royal Mint blockchain gold asks you to trust in the UK government – Royal Canadian Mint and GoldMoney blockchain product asks you to trust in government and the technology, servers, websites etc of the providers – Invest in a gold mine using cryptocurrency – but wait until 2022 for your gold...

On Bloomberg, Yuji Nakamura and Lulu Yilun Chen report about conflicting views in the Bitcoin community on how to address capacity limits in the blockchain. Bitcoin Unlimited is essentially a software upgrade to the blockchain. Years ago, bitcoin’s early developers imposed a cap on the amount of data it could process. While that slowed down the network, it was seen as a necessary safety measure against potential attackers who could overload the system. Now, Unlimited supporters say the...

The European Financial Review, February-March 2017. HTML, PDF. See the VoxEU article.