novo papel dos investidores profissionais com a ascensão dos ICOs – swapynetwork (47) in bitcoin

Dear investors: The times are changing…

swapynetwork (47) in bitcoin

Dear investors,

I would like to start this letter by sharing with you a song of Bob Dylan, the first song writer to get Nobel Prize in literature:

This is my message to you: The times are changing.

We, the entrepreneurs, and you, the investors have lived in a symbiosis since the early days of venture capital. You need us to multiply your money. We need you to provide the much needed capital to invest in our dreams. The numbers of this game are very known to all of us.

For every 100 ideas you listen to, you choose 1 to invest on. For every 10 ideas that you invest on, 1 ends up being a success. So, for an average entrepreneur, our chances of success are 1% for getting initial capital and, for those who get capital, 10% for being a success. Therefore, our chances of being a success are 1/1000.

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Nature of a Digital Coin? By Adam Davidson @ new yorker

What Is the Nature of a Digital Coin? Paris Hilton Might Know, but the S.E.C. Doesn’t

his week, the Securities and Exchange Commission made an odd, veiled threat, in the form of a short notice on its Web site, “Statement on Potentially Unlawful Promotion of Initial Coin Offerings and Other Investments by Celebrities and Others.” The commission didn’t use any names, but those in the know had little doubt: its warning was meant for Paris Hilton.Continue reading→

The missing blockchain category – by Chris Huls

Summary: in long-term we need a hybrid neutral blockchain network operated by (semi-)public agencies to gain adoption, efficiency and also control for hundreds of blockchain applications

The future of payments. The end of all trusted intermediaries. A new world currency? The holy grail for … everything? Blockchain technology is booming and has been named as the most revolutionary technology since the Internet. The hype started in 2015, but is still continuing. Meaning the added value is difficult to commercialize, but also that the potential might reach beyond our dreams. This 3-year hype delivered us tens of usable blockchain platforms, hundreds of use cases and thousands of startups and corporates diving into the technology. Interestingly, as no real blockchain application is yet in production, except of course cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The question is how the future will look like in which we have many sustainable blockchain applications. In my opinion we’ve done a great deal, but one major category of blockchain networks is missing.Continue reading→

This Is the Reason Ethereum Exists – by Mike Orcutt

The world’s second-most-valuable cryptocurrency is also its most interesting—but in order to understand it, you must first understand its origins.

by Mike Orcutt

“(…) Bitcoin eventually took off, and soon people latched onto the idea that its blockchain could be used to do other things (…) But its design, intended specifically for a currency, limited the range of applications it could support, and Bitcoin aficionados started brainstorming new approaches.

It was from this primordial soup that Ethereum emerged.

In a 2013 white paper, Vitalik Buterin, then just 19, laid out his plan for a blockchain system that could also facilitate all sorts of “decentralized applications.”

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Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree – by Narayanan & Clark

The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.

Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark

“…not to diminish Nakamoto’s achievement but to point out that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Indeed, by tracing the origins of the ideas in bitcoin, we can zero in on Nakamoto’s true leap of insight—the specific, complex way in which the underlying components are put together. This helps explain why bitcoin took so long to be invented. Readers already familiar with how bitcoin works may gain a deeper understanding from this historical presentation.(…) Bitcoin’s intellectual history also serves as a case study demonstrating the relationships among academia, outside researchers, and practitioners, and offers lessons on how these groups can benefit from one another.

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Elliptic Curve Cryptography – By Jimmy Song

Blockchain 101 – Elliptic Curve Cryptography

By Jimmy Song, Principal Blockchain Architect

“…Finite fields are one thing and elliptic curves another. We can combine them by defining an elliptic curve over a finite field. All the equations for an elliptic curve work over a finite field. By “work”, we mean that we can do the same addition, subtraction, multiplication and division as defined in a particular finite field and all the equations stay true. If this sounds confusing, it is. Abstract algebra is abstract!Continue reading→

Introduction to EOS by trogdor @ steemit

the Epic (blockchain) Operating System

trogdor (63) in eos
EOS is a consensus blockchain operating system that provides databases, account permissions, scheduling, authentication, and internet-application communication to massively improve the efficiency of smart business development that uses parallelization to make possible blockchain scalability to millions of users and millions of transactions per second.

(…)

In order to introduce EOS, we first need to understand the current state of blockchain tech, and how we got here. (…)

In 2013, the decentralized exchange Bitshares was built, and in 2014 Bitshares was launched. It used delegated proof-of-stake giving 3 second confirmation times with very predictable, reliable block production. The first version of Bitshares was built off of some of the same ideas as Bitcoin and shared some technology, but still didn’t meet the performance requirements of an exchange. In 2015 Graphene was created, and Bitshares was completely rewritten. This was able to achieve 100,000 transaction per second on a single machine, and decentralized global stress testing achieved 18,000 transactions per second on a distributed network. (…)

If you look at the blockchain industry, everyone wants to build smart businesses, decentralized organizations, etc…, and in the process developers built decentralized computers from the ground up which can run their smart apps. In this process, all app developers have to solve many of the same problems: account systems, recovery processes, multi-sig, manage challenges, and what they’re missing is the operating system, (…). EOS aims to provide this operating system to provide all the core functions to app developers and allow them to focus on just the business logic that makes their apps unique.

EOS provides an operating system and a decentralized computer to radically improve the efficiency of smart business development.
What do DAPPs require?

…”

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Distributed Securities Depository on blockchain

Using Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts to Create a Distributed Securities Depository by Eric Wall and Gustaf Malm

“Summarized, this paper aims to:
• Provide an analysis of blockchain technology at its current state of development
• Address the possibilities of leveraging blockchain innovations in the securities market infrastructure
• Address the issues of balancing decentralized blockchain database structures within the financial industry to conform to regulatory policies
• Outline possible routes of adoption of blockchain technologies in the securities industry while addressing the challenges ahead
• Propose overarching blockchain design choices suitable for a securities depository

Additionally, this paper aims to describe designs for delivery versus payment in different blockchain paradigms.”

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zkSNARKs – by Christian Reitwiessner

zkSNARKs in a nutshell

Posted by Christian Reitwiessner

“The possibilities of zkSNARKs are impressive, you can verify the correctness of computations without having to execute them and you will not even learn what was executed – just that it was done correctly. Unfortunately, most explanations of zkSNARKs resort to hand-waving at some point and thus they remain something “magical”, suggesting that only the most enlightened actually understand how and why (and if?) they work. The reality is that zkSNARKs can be reduced to four simple techniques and this blog post aims to explain them. Anyone who can understand how the RSA cryptosystem works, should also get a pretty good understanding of currently employed zkSNARKs. Let’s see if it will achieve its goal!Continue reading→

Fat Protocols – by Joel Monegro

“Fat Protocols

Here’s one way to think about the differences between the Internet and the Blockchain. The previous generation of shared protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) produced immeasurable amounts of value, but most of it got captured and re-aggregated on top at the applications layer, largely in the form of data (think Google, Facebook and so on). Continue reading→

Bitcoins: Payments Among Men with No Names – by Sarah Meiklejohn et al

A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage

“Bitcoin is a purely online virtual currency, unbacked by either physical commodities or sovereign obligation; instead, it relies on a combination of cryptographic protection and a peer-to-peer protocol for witnessing settlements. Consequently, Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then using re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters. From this analysis, we characterize longitudinal changes in the Bitcoin market, the stresses these changes are placing on the system, and the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale.

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