tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27276128561919434022024-03-19T13:26:52.131+01:00Corporate Strategy, Open Source Facts, Knowledge, Wisdom, ThoughtsThe views expressed here are my own, and do not necessarily - unless specifically mentioned - reflect those of my employers, past, current, or future.Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.comBlogger80125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-39264863267601421522017-04-06T09:42:00.001+02:002017-04-06T09:42:13.278+02:00Medium...Dear readers, I will be exploring <a href="https://medium.com/">Medium</a> for my future blogging. You can find my <a href="https://medium.com/@gravax">Medium blog here</a>.<div>
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I might, for some time, post copies of my Medium articles here... But the main source will be Medium (until / unless I revert back to here).</div>
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Please follow me there.</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-8200004148297572992017-03-28T14:23:00.005+02:002017-03-28T14:36:43.660+02:00Marine Le Pen et Bitcoin<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="7qrri" data-offset-key="ds0a-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="ds0a-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">(Exceptionnellement, je vais parler politique sur ce blog... mais c'est parce que ça touche les monnaies numériques comme les bitcoins.)</span><br />
<span data-offset-key="ds0a-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">On ne le répétera pas assez, mais Marine Le Pen ne sait pas de quoi elle parle. Et malgré ça, il y a encore des gens qui imaginent qu'elle pourrait être à la tête de notre pays?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Exemple spécifique. Cet article, de sa main : </span><a href="http://www.frontnational.com/2016/05/les-monnaies-virtuelles-non-a-lalienation-des-citoyens-programmee-par-lue/" style="font-family: inherit;">http://www.frontnational.com/2016/05/les-monnaies-virtuelles-non-a-lalienation-des-citoyens-programmee-par-lue/</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> où elle explique :</span><br />
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">"</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit;">Le puissant lobby des banques d’affaires de Wall Street (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs..) relayé par le forum économique mondial de Davos 2016, a vendu deux idées aux Etats et aux institutions comme l’UE : les monnaies virtuelles ou crypto -monnaies (dont la plus connue est le Bitcoin) et une société sans argent liquide.</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Notez le vocabulaire traditionnel des populistes ("</span><b style="font-family: inherit;">puissant lobby</b><span style="font-family: inherit;">")... et les grands méchants (Wall Street, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, le WEF, l'UE), et le fait qu'ils aient "</span><b style="font-family: inherit;">vendu</b><span style="font-family: inherit;">" l'idée...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Puis elle ajoute :</span><br />
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">"</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit;">Plus la monnaie sera dématérialisée et numérisée, plus nous perdrons la propriété de notre argent qui est une de nos libertés fondamentales, et plus se restreint l’espace de notre vie privée. A terme, c’est une prise en otage des citoyens par les banques privées et par un contrôle de toutes les transactions."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(Je fais un simple copier-coller de ses propres mots dans l'article, hein, je n'invente rien.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Il n'y a rien de plus ridicule. Le principe même des crypto-monnaies est la décentralisation totale, et l'absence de dépendance sur, et de régulation par, une quelconque autorité centrale. C'est le détenteur du porte monnaie (wallet) de la crypto devise qui a le contrôle total et la gestion de son argent. Alors que dans le cas d'une monnaie fiat (comme l'Euro, le Franc Suisse... c'est l'état).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Si il y a bien un truc que les banques privées ne peuvent pas faire c'est bien prendre en otage les citoyens, et contrôler toutes les transactions. Bitcoin repose sur une blockchain publique, donc tout le monde (et pas seulement les banques privées) peuvent </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">observer</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> les transactions, mais impossible de les </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">contrôler</b><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Justement lors de la crise en Grèce il y a quelque temps, quand le gouvernement a autorisé les banques privées à prélever l'argent des détenteurs de comptes en cas de risque de faillite de la banque, </span><a href="http://www.usine-digitale.fr/editorial/crise-grecque-le-bitcoin-devient-une-valeur-refuge.N338965" style="font-family: inherit;">les gens se sont rabattus sur les bitcoins</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, qui leur garantissaient, justement, que personne d'autre que eux mêmes ne pourraient piocher dans leur porte monnaie en bitcoins.</span><br />
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">Elle conclue avec une autre assertion totalement irréaliste et farfelue : "</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: inherit;">Par conséquent, dans le cadre de l’application de son modèle de patriotisme économique, il empêchera l’usage de crypto-monnaies, telles que le Bitcoin en France.</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">" Au risque de me répéter, une crypto-monnaie (comme Bitcoin) est totalement décentralisée, et rien, ni personne, ne peut en prendre le contrôle, ou en interdire l'usage. Des gouvernements bien plus totalitaires que ne pourrait l'être un Front National français au pouvoir, par exemple la Chine, ont tenté d'<a href="http://fr.euronews.com/2013/12/18/bitcoin-pratiquement-interdite-en-chine-la-monnaie-numerique-plonge">empêcher l'utilisation de bitcoin</a> par leurs citoyens en interdisant aux banques chinoises de faire les conversions bitcoin<->renminbi ... et ça a été un échec total... ils ont fait <a href="http://achat-bitcoins.com/bitcoin-pas-interdit-chine/">machine arrière</a>. Alors imaginer qu'un gouvernement comme celui en France pourrait y arriver est au mieux irréaliste, au pire ridicule.</span><br />
<b style="font-family: inherit;">Bitcoin <a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf">a été conçu</a> dans le cadre d'un projet de société décentralisée, ne permettant à aucune entité centralisée d'en prendre le contrôle, afin d'assurer aux citoyens une totale liberté d'utilisation, et un contrôle individuel parfait de leurs fonds.</b><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mais si Marine Le Pen se renseignait avant de s'exprimer sur un sujet comme celui ci... ça se saurait.</span></div>
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Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-6007351124629557182017-03-04T08:36:00.001+01:002017-03-04T08:36:49.649+01:00Can I trust a trustless network?I've ran into that question more than a few times, so I thought I would take the time and provide an answer here.<br />
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First some context. This question is asked usually when talking about blockchains, and in particular permissionless ones like the bitcoin blockchain. People have heard it called a trustless blockchain, and as such tend to think it means you can't trust it. Of course, this is wrong. It's a vocabulary issue. Let me tell you why.<br />
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But first let's look at a non computer problem. It's called the Byzantine Generals Problem (also called, nowadays: <i>BGP</i>). It's an abstract problem to represent a real situation. It's described in this paper (<a href="http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/fa12/hand-outs/Original_Byzantine.pdf">link to PDF</a>):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: blue;"><br />We imagine that several divisions of the Byzantine army are camped outside
an enemy city, each division commanded by its own general. The generals can
communicate with one another only by messenger. After observing the enemy,
they must decide upon a common plan of action. However, some of the generals may be traitors, trying to prevent the loyal generals from reaching agreement.
The generals must have an algorithm to guarantee that:</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="color: blue;">A. All loyal generals decide upon the same plan of action.</span><ul>
<li><span style="color: blue;">The loyal generals will all do what the algorithm says they should, but the
traitors may do anything they wish. The algorithm must guarantee condition A
regardless of what the traitors do.
The loyal generals should not only reach agreement, but should agree upon a
reasonable plan. We therefore also want to insure that</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="color: blue;">B. A small number of traitors cannot cause the loyal generals to adopt a bad
plan.</span></blockquote>
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This problem describes a real world situation where you have several entities that need to communicate across a network that they need to trust... though they don't trust each individual node.<br />
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Do you start seeing where I'm going?<br />
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Now, that paper (written in 1980, published in 1982, way before we talked about blockchains, or bitcoin, so nothing new under the sun) is 400 pages long, and includes all the gory details of the solutions that work well. I'm just going to summarize here.<br />
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The paper shows that there are several possible solutions (<b>under certain conditions</b>) that enable the creation of a computer system that can provide a trusted environment for the generals to communicate even though the trust level of each individual node is unknown.<br />
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This is what is called a <b>trustless network</b>: <b><i>a network you can trust, even though you don't know if you can trust each individual node that it is made of</i></b>.<br />
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Of course there are conditions. You need to be able to trust enough of the nodes and other things. But you have the general (pun intended) idea.<br />
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Blockchains implement that.<br />
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<i>Permissioned</i> blockchains usually address the Byzantine Generals Problem and this is called Byzantine Fault Tolerance: <i>BFT</i>.<br />
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<i>Permissionless</i> blockchains address the same kind of situation with a different model called <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work">Proof-of-Work</a> (aka: <i>PoW</i>).<br />
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The <i><b>Bitcoin network</b></i> (the largest production blockchain network) uses the <i><a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash">Hashcash</a> </i>PoW which was invented in 1997.<br />
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In both cases, we have a network for which each individual component cannot be necessarily trusted, but a solution is brought which enables entities to transact across that network in a trusted way.<br />
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<b>This is a trustless network. You can trust it, despite not knowing if you can trust each individual node.</b><br />
<br />Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-34500164017927270442017-01-31T10:08:00.003+01:002017-03-01T12:30:48.057+01:00Do you really need blockchain? Or could you just pick the right database?Provocative title for a subject that is very close to my heart.<br />
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As recently as yesterday, I was talking with a customer about blockchain technologies and their use cases. We were discussion permissioned and permissionless blockchains.<br />
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The point that I was making was that in many cases, when businesses use a permissioned blockchain, they are basically using it as a fancy distributed database with some mechanisms to prevent unauthorized tampering with data that is stored into it. Actually, in many cases, something like a Cassandra, or a MongoDB with MAC and some form of audit trail would do the job just as nicely as a permissioned blockchain.<br />
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Gartner has a report that is a little under 2 months old called <a href="https://www.gartner.com/doc/3551417/top--mistakes-enterprise-blockchain">Top 10 Mistakes in Enterprise Blockchain Projects</a> that has that point as one of the conclusions.<br />
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Now there is nothing wrong in choosing a blockchain technology because you want to explore the use of blockchains. But if your objective is not blockchain exploration or education, think about more common, more stable, established technologies.<br />
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That doesn't mean blockchain is useless. In fact, it's one of the biggest game changing technologies to come around. But I think the biggest revolution will come from using permissionless blockchains like the Bitcoin network, <a href="https://www.ethereum.org/">Ethereum</a>, <a href="https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/">Stellar</a>... to enable a whole new class of community / shared economy platforms which will be at the heart of tomorrow's societies.<br />
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Permissionless blockchains will enable IoT devices to share their services in exchange of digital currency that they will use to pay for their utilities... Those IoT devices could be as simple as your smartphone selling very precisely geolocalized pressure measurements to weather services in exchange for ethers used to pay for data service, or an autonomous rental car that self drives passengers who come in, receives payments on an ethereum wallet, and uses those ethers to pay for electricity recharges, over embedded induction loops as it drives around the city, and pays for a support contract allowing for regularly scheduled services with that same ethereum wallet... or an autonomous rental house that pays for utilities using the same ethereum wallet that it's visitors use to pay it for their stay.<br />
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Every time you are thinking about using a blockchain technology, first think very much about whether this technology is absolutely required, or if it's a significant enabler without which your project would be much much harder to do, or if it's basically being used to do what you could do with a distributed database and a bit of extra code.<br />
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There are great, fantastic, use cases where blockchain technologies (and in particular permissionless blockchains) are true enablers for new classes of killer applications. Explore these, and set on a course to change the world.Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-22191719860998279662017-01-27T09:05:00.001+01:002017-01-27T09:05:09.945+01:00Encouraging development on great ideas by finding patents fallen into the public domain...<div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", NotoColorEmoji, "Segoe UI Symbol", "Android Emoji", EmojiSymbols; font-size: 16px;">
This is an interesting project from Michigan Technology University: <a class="OWAAutoLink" href="http://freeip.mtu.edu/home/" id="LPlnk647144" previewremoved="true">http://freeip.mtu.edu/home/</a></div>
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The idea is that if somebody places a patent... and then at some point stops paying the maintenance fees, the patent falls in the public domain. So <a href="http://www.mtu.edu/">Michigan Technology University</a> lets one find these patents... with a search engine, and the idea is that they hope it will encourage developers to create open source projects based on these ideas that are now available for everybody to use.</div>
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This is much more interesting than waiting for patents that have expired because they're more than 20 years old... These here can be much more recent... How many patent trolls will be kicked out because they place patents, but then might forget (or not have the budget) to pay the fees...</div>
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In a way, I think it's a great project. But I'm sure some lawyers will see this as a great opportunity for suing developers.</div>
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I'm curious, and even impatient, to see what first projects come out of this.</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-27800971632710606192017-01-17T09:15:00.001+01:002017-01-17T09:15:30.323+01:00New article on blockchain beyond financial servicesMy colleague <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-ann-francis-223b552b">Mary-Ann Francis</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillesgravier">myself</a> co-authored an article on blockchain beyond financial services. You can read it here : <a href="http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/751/156076.html">http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/751/156076.html</a>Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-67016186510772260632016-12-07T09:28:00.001+01:002016-12-07T09:28:46.868+01:00Is Your Open Source Strategy Serving Your Corporate Strategy ?<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">I just posted a new article on Wipro's corporate page about how to leverage your open source strategy to better serve your corporate strategy.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">The article is posted here : </span><a href="http://www.wipro.com/insights/industry-research/hitech/is-your-open-source-strategy-serving-your-corporate-strategy/" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">http://www.wipro.com/insights/industry-research/hitech/is-your-open-source-strategy-serving-your-corporate-strategy/</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">And it is also available as a direct PDF to download here : </span><a href="http://www.wipro.com/documents/Is-Your-Open-Source-Strategy-Serving-Your-Corporate-Strategy.pdf" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">http://www.wipro.com/documents/Is-Your-Open-Source-Strategy-Serving-Your-Corporate-Strategy.pdf</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">I hope you find it useful!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.61px;">Don't hesitate to comment here!</span>Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-67764407660876729192016-10-23T17:40:00.001+02:002016-10-23T17:40:55.063+02:00R3 Open-sources Corda For All The Wrong Reasons<br />
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So normally you open source a project because you think it makes sense for all the <a href="http://thinkingopensource.blogspot.fr/2015/11/what-is-your-open-source-stratgegy.html">good reasons</a> (speed up development, innovation, drive mindshare, encourage adoption). <a href="https://r3cev.com/">R3 </a>is doing it for their blockchain... because they are having cash issues?</div>
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<a class="OWAAutoLink" href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/r3-finally-open-sources-blockchain-project-admits-budget-difficulty" id="LPlnk284416">https://cointelegraph.com/news/r3-finally-open-sources-blockchain-project-admits-budget-difficulty</a></div>
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Open sourcing will not save them. It might keep the product alive if they (R3) drop the project itself... But my prediction is that if R3 drops their blockchain... <a href="https://www.hyperledger.org/">Hyperledger </a>will win instead.</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-66994082529916163432016-10-05T08:57:00.000+02:002016-10-05T08:57:37.869+02:00Blockchain and banks are about to get a lot more interesting!<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;">I posted a </span><a href="http://www.wipro.com/blogs/blockchain-and-banks-are-about-to-get-a-lot-more-interesting/">new entry</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;"> on my </span><a href="http://www.wipro.com/blogs/author/gilles-gravier/" style="background-color: white; color: #009eb8; display: inline; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light", HelveticaNeue-Light, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; outline: none; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s;">Wipro corporate blog</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;">.</span><br />
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For some time now, since bitcoin has brought Blockchain technologies to the front pages of newspapers and blogs, banks have been looking at this new beast trying to figure out what to make of it.</div>
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At the beginning, everybody was talking bitcoin, of course. But very quickly, the sulfurous nature of the crypto currency made people afraid of it. Very soon, when I was talking to banks about Blockchain projects and use cases, I would hear them say things like <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">"We have a policy against using bitcoin" or "There's no way we are going to use bitcoin in our projects" </em>and so on. Then there's the fact that banks tend to shy away from permissionless Blockchain because they feel these are too public, that the data exchanged is visible by everybody. Privacy issues are key for banks. As a result, up till now, most banks have been looking to work with permissioned Blockchain and projects such as <a href="https://r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">R3CEV's consortium and its blockchain Corda</a>. The <a href="https://www.hyperledger.org/" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Hyperledger project</a>'s <a href="https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">fabric</a> is also a great source of interest for most of these organizations.</div>
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The tide is starting to turn, it seems, as some of the banks I've been talking to are now openly saying that they are evaluating projects that would live either on the Ethereum network, or even the Bitcoin network. This is a huge change in attitude, and I think it is tremendously interesting as it probably hints at something that is starting to contradict a few points that I have been making up till now, specifically that <a href="http://thinkingopensource.blogspot.fr/2016/03/why-are-banks-terrified-of-using-bitcoin.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">banks are afraid to use bitcoin</a>, and that they are only, today, <a href="http://thinkingopensource.blogspot.fr/2016/01/banks-and-blockchain-wheres-innovation.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">looking at use cases where they are porting existing internal processes</a> (say cross-border payments, Forex…) to blockchain, instead of trying to innovate fully by inventing new models and services to offer their customers. Using permissionless Blockchain, in particular those from the Ethereum or bitcoin networks enables all kinds of new interactions with all their end-user customers, and not just their peers in the banking network.</div>
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The additional significant element is that most of the permissionless Blockchain networks, like <a href="https://github.com/ethereum" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Ethereum</a> or <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Bitcoin</a>, actually are based on, and can be fully accessed by open source software. This lowers the barrier to entry for banks (and other entities interested in exploring use cases on these networks) and enables seamless creation of proof-of-concepts. As a result, banks are starting to have dedicated teams that explore using permissionless Blockchain to reinvent the way they could interact with their customers. And they can do that without having to pay significant amount of money in license fees for something that, as a proof-of-concept, could well end up being discarded after a few weeks… or end up vastly scaled up into full production after a few months. The only cost for working with open source software is the real value add: people, services, training, support… enabling companies to start small, and scale when and how it makes sense for them.</div>
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With permissionless Blockchain, since organizations don't need to fully know each individual actor on a blockchain in advance, they can create new applications that natively address large, possibly undefined, communities, offering services that are aimed at bringing trust, speed, and reliability at very low cost to new populations of users. This lets them focus on their core values (for banks: trust, reliability…) while creating a new world where they still be relevant instead of being replaced by totally distributed, decentralized, disintermediated structures shared among the users themselves.</div>
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So, have you also taken the step beyond permissioned Blockchain? What are you looking at in terms of technologies, and what exciting ideas are you going to pursue with it to change your world, to change the world?</div>
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Let's discuss this here, or through my <a href="http://twitter.com/gravax/" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">twitter account</a>.</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-58242416290851015182016-09-22T11:54:00.004+02:002016-09-22T11:54:47.227+02:00The mutable immutable distributed ledger (aka Accenture's editable blockchain)Just a few days ago, Accenture announced that they had applied for a patent (EU and US) to cover an <a href="https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-debuts-prototype-of-editable-blockchain-for-enterprise-and-permissioned-systems.htm">editable blockchain</a>. This has set the world of blockchain technologies into a turmoil.<br />
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Lets look at it from two different perspectives.<br />
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First, it's a patent. In the world of blockchain technologies, most of the code out there (<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://github.com/stellar">stellar</a>, <a href="https://github.com/ethereum">ethereum</a>, and so many more) is open source. This is a community that doesn't take very well things like patents. In fact, the open source community is usually quite <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html">opposed</a> to patents and one could very well imagine Accenture's patent to make the top entry of the <a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month">Stupid Patent of the Month</a> page very soon.<br />
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Second, it's blockchain... One of the key elements of a blockchain is the immutability of what's stored in it. The fact that you can <b>trust</b> that the data in the blockchain hasn't been tampered with. If you enter a transaction (of token T from A to B) in a blockchain, the only thing you can do later on is to do another transaction either from A to B with additional tokens... or from B to some other entity (A or C) of the token T (or its equivalent). That's it. That's the way you can trace back every transaction ever entered in a blockchain. That's how you can be sure that you'll find full traceability of everything entered in the blockchain. That's why solutions like <a href="http://www.blockverify.io/">blockverify.io</a> and <a href="https://www.provenance.org/">Provenance</a> can offer excellent supply chain transparency models.<br />
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If you are going to built a distributed ledger (or datastore of some sort) that allows editing of entries, you might as well use a standard distributed database like <a href="https://www.mongodb.com/">MongoDB</a> or <a href="http://cassandra.apache.org/">Cassandra</a>, and then add some way of access control and auditing to suit your needs.<br />
<br />Designing a mutable version of what is normally an immutable storage system is, at best, counterproductive... Accenture has shown a deep understanding of what blockchain is all about.Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-18696267147788992802016-08-19T18:07:00.005+02:002016-08-30T16:05:08.485+02:00Open Source community in two minds over Maria DB’s move<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;">I posted a </span><a href="http://www.wipro.com/blogs/open-source-community-in-two-minds-over-maria-dbs-move/">new entry</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;"> on my </span><a href="http://www.wipro.com/blogs/author/gilles-gravier/" style="background-color: white; color: #009eb8; display: inline; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light", HelveticaNeue-Light, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; outline: none; text-align: justify; transition: color 0.3s;">Wipro corporate blog</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;">.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue light" , , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.6px; text-align: justify;">(20160830 update : below is the text from the original entry on my Wipro blog)</span><br />
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In a move to try and generate more revenue from its open source software, the <a href="https://mariadb.org/" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">MariaDB Corporation</a> has decided to publish the version 2.0 of its MaxScale database proxy. It is aimed at providing vast scalability of database applications through load distribution and balancing, across a database cluster, under a completely new license. It tries to sound Open Source while enforcing a commercial model.</div>
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In the MySQL world, this clustering was one of the paying enterprise features. In MariaDB, it was traditionally a free (as is the rest of MariaDB) feature. This distinguished it significantly from its Oracle counterpart.</div>
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The new license that MaxScale is published under is called <a href="https://mariadb.com/bsl" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">BSL</a> - Business Source License - and was created by the MariaDB Corporation in an effort to enforce some form of mandatory revenue stream while trying to keep a semblance of open source spirit to it. In a somewhat delicate attempt to justify this, Michael “Monty” Widenius, author of the original MySQL, and now of MariaDB - which is a fork of MySQL - <a href="http://monty-says.blogspot.in/2016/08/applying-business-source-licensing-bsl.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">tries to give a rationale</a> to this bold, and <a href="http://swanhart.livejournal.com/140324.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">unpopular</a> move.</div>
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The general idea of this <a href="https://mariadb.com/bsl" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">new license</a> is to have some form of timeframe during which the software is usable in enterprise production only in a commercial way (for MaxScale, this is defined as running on less than 3 servers). After this time-frame (for MaxScale, this is defined as ending on 01/01/2019), the software will revert to a “Change License” (for MaxScale this has been selected as GPL Version 2 or later). The rest of the usage of the software is governed by terminology that is inspired by the BSD 3 clause license (aka “New BSD License”).</div>
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From the beginning, the source code of software governed by BSL is available, and can be modified, distributed, compiled just as with normal open source... in fact, the whole software behaves as full open source, except for the limitation of number of nodes you talk to, and for the fact that the license changes to GPL after a set time. Interestingly enough, the initial license (BSD derived) and the final license (GPL) are diverse in spirit.</div>
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The core issue is that open source is quite <a href="https://opensource.org/osd-annotated" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">formally defined by the Open Source Initiative</a>. This definition is made of 10 points that are there to guarantee the freedom necessary for software to be considered <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Free/Libre Open Source Software</a>. In the list of 10 points, the number 6 point states “No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavor”, which means you should be able to use FLOSS software in any context you want, commercially, enterprise, regardless of the technology architecture or scale. This is clearly not allowed with BSL license.</div>
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There are currently several revenue models of open source that generate very good profits. All are based on the notion of adoption. You try, you use, and if you like enough, you will want to get support. Some models for this include dual licensing, with subscription models, or pay for integration, support, training services. All are based on choice, not coercion. However, creating a new license that attempts to enforce a commercial model, rather than offering services that encourage working with a commercial vendor is not popular, and not well aligned with the notion of freedom that comes with open source.</div>
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On the other hand, other development teams such as Percona are <a href="https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/08/18/proxysql-1-2-1-ga-release/" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">announcing</a> at the same time new versions of ProxySQL, their equivalent high-performance proxy servers for MySQL / MariaDB / Percona Server and marking it clearly as Open Source with the GPLv3 license. And they very clearly state <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“ProxySQL is available under OpenSource license GPLv3, which allows you unlimited usage in production. ProxySQL has no plans to change the license!”</em></div>
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Today, MariaDB Corporation is trying to encourage other software development teams to look at, and start using, the BSL license as well. They are hoping to set a trend for a new way of developing software and making money from it.</div>
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What about you as a developer of open source software, and trying to make a living out of it? Have you looked at BSL? What do you think about this?</div>
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Share your comments here, on the Wipro blog, or via <a href="https://twitter.com/gravax">Twitter</a> !</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-830529829924526862016-08-15T08:54:00.002+02:002016-09-21T16:13:06.351+02:00A new entry on W3C blockchain workshop on my Wipro blogI posted a <a href="http://www.wipro.com/blogs/inside-w3cs-workshop-for-blockchain-standards/">new entry</a> on my <a href="http://www.wipro.com/blogs/author/gilles-gravier/">Wipro corporate blog</a>. Here is the text from it:<br />
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An opportunity to attend a 2-day blockchain workshop, organized by Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA, in late June, provided a great insight on the need for a dedicated blockchain working group and the kind of standards such a group should address. The outcome of this workshop as shared here, could shape a remarkable era in which blockchain technology will re-order how we manage trust without a central authentication authority for transactions in areas as diverse as banking, trading, education, music, real estate, healthcare, government services and even ride sharing.</div>
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So how massive is the impact of blockchain likely to be? Late last year, when reporting the first securities transaction processed on the NASDAQ blockchain platform, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/12/30/nasdaqs-blockchain-based-securities-platform-records-first-transaction/" rel="nofollow" style="border: none; color: #3188c0; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"> noted</a> that the technology could cut US$20 billion in annual costs in the global banking system alone. Blockchain can not only trigger savings by eliminating intermediaries but also slash time in completing transactions. Indeed, the fact that most of the blockchain code out there is open source, removes the cost entry barrier. Trust is designed in the architecture of blockchain and hence it becomes easy for any entity to operate in the trusted environment that blockchain brings with it. These are very exciting possibilities. And the amazing energy in the W3C workshop reflected the promise held by blockchain.</div>
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Among the most important exercises at the workshop were the discussions on subjects such as identity, legal, cloud, etc. It was indeed a privilege to witness each table presenting its findings and proposing directions for possible working group activities. To fuel the excitement, votes were taken to rate themes and prioritize them. The first immediate result of the workshop was the creation of the Blockchain Digital Assets Community Group - <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">time to join and participate</em>. For CIOs eyeing the technology, the outcome of the workshop will spell relief. Many are currently being deterred because of a lack of interoperable standards (among other things).</div>
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It was therefore good to see people at the workshop from the attendees to pure blockchain industry (people developing blockchain products or running blockchain networks) and also users (and some quite significant players in the financial markets). There was an exchange of views and knowledge and everyone got down to the task of figuring out what should be done next. But, as you may expect, in addition to the pure "standards" work that took place, there was a whole lot of networking going on.</div>
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What intrigued me, and came up a lot at the workshop, was the issue of web developers accessing blockchain to build apps via standard APIs. Many discussions revolved around the identity of users and the provenance (the record of ownership) of assets, two issues that greatly affect the financial services industry. People tend to think blockchain is the solution to everything. Well, it's not. It's a fantastic technology with great potential. Given its nature of being a distributed, shared, transaction database with immutability built in, it is well suited to certain types of use cases. Exploring them with the crowd there was just great!</div>
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We came out of this workshop with a much clearer idea of where W3C should progress in terms of standardization areas for blockchain. But more importantly, the intensive discussions shed light on where the technology can be put to good and effective use.</div>
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My colleague Presanna. V. Sundararajan (Practice Head - Blockchain and API platform, Wipro Ltd) put it really well when he said, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">"The standards are going to be the backbone of blockchain adoption. They will bring industry together. It will impact the whole business community and in the future blockchain might just be the standard for everything that we do, just like the Internet is now."</em></div>
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Now it is time to sit down and take all those ideas and put them into practice!</div>
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Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-83772630861919985482016-06-26T15:06:00.003+02:002016-06-26T15:06:59.797+02:00Has The DAO failed?I just read a very interesting post. Full of very valid thoughts on what happened to The DAO, and the context and reasons.<br />
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Have a look at this page : <a href="https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/blockchains-smart-contracts-and-the-law-709c5b4a9895">https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/blockchains-smart-contracts-and-the-law-709c5b4a9895</a><br />
<br />Now, in the Final Thoughts sections, the author says "<i><b>What’s clear is that The DAO has failed.</b></i>"...<div>
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Really? Has it? The story isn't even over yet. We haven't seen the final resolution. I'm not ready to say The DAO has failed. What I'm seeing today is that it is creating a new world where our rules don't apply... this means new rules need to be created so that they CAN apply. That's what is happening. The DAO has identified where new rules are needed. That's not failure. That's, at worst, growing pains. But growing is nature's way of identifying success.<br /><br /><br />The author also says : "<b><i>Trying to find legal solutions to technical problems in systems that are designed to solve legal problems doesn’t quite make sense.</i></b>"...</div>
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Indeed. But what is being done at this stage, though not necessarily in the way everybody would imagine, is creating new ways of dealing with problems we didn't have before. For example, consensus based resolution of disagreements : <a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/24/dao-wars-youre-voice-soft-fork-dilemma/">https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/24/dao-wars-youre-voice-soft-fork-dilemma/</a></div>
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A brave new world is being given birth too. And it's not on life support yet. :)</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-84196106056548109662016-06-17T11:26:00.002+02:002016-06-17T11:26:13.234+02:00The DAO is under attack<div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
This : <a href="https://steemit.com/thedao/@xeroc/ongoing-attack-on-thedao---eth-draining-from-the-pot" id="LPlnk817831" target="_blank">https://steemit.com/thedao/@xeroc/ongoing-attack-on-thedao---eth-draining-from-the-pot</a></div>
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Probably one of the first coordinated, high scale, attack on a blockchain system. Not something like Mount Gox where the guys lost (or ran away) with the private keys of the users... No... a deliberate <span style="font-family: Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif,Apple Color Emoji,Segoe UI Emoji,NotoColorEmoji,Segoe UI Symbol,Android Emoji,EmojiSymbols; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">attack </span></span>(it seems - I think it could also just be a piece of code gone rogue... somebody who wrote a recursive contract that went out of control).</div>
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The coming hours will be critical. The Ethereum pool allocated to the DAO is being drained very very fast. As a result, the exchange rate for Ether to the Bitcoin is dropping violently in the last hours.</div>
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(Data taken from <a href="http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/">Coin Market Cap</a> at 11:20 CET)</div>
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Intense counter measures are put in place by the community to try to control the damage, but I think at this time, everybody is still playing a bit sorcerer's apprentice...</div>
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You can see the result of the counter measures on the last hour or so... </div>
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Live updates at : <a href="https://blog.slock.it/dao-security-advisory-live-updates-2a0a42a2d07b">https://blog.slock.it/dao-security-advisory-live-updates-2a0a42a2d07b</a></div>
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Rough times... Interesting to see if the "Autonomous" system will survive, if the community can handle the crisis...</div>
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Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-32835177995479399522016-05-23T17:01:00.001+02:002016-05-23T17:01:22.487+02:00No... Bitcoin isn't a bank. No it doesn't compete head-on with banks...Once more I read that says something along the line of - I paraphrase - <b><i>the Bitcoin network growing up to a point where it replaces the banking system</i></b>. And once again I cringe when I read or hear that.<br />
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So let's take a step back and look at what the Bitcoin network is. It's a transaction processing network. Albeit a really smart, decentralized, self running, self securing one... But it really just processes transactions. You tell it "I would like to make it known that I'm transferring X amount that I know to recipient Y". It goes and checks that you effectively have control of this amount, and transfer the control/ownership to the person, and makes sure that this transfer is properly notarized (time-stamped and all) and that it doesn't take place multiple times.<br />
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That's it.<br />
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While every block in the Bitcoin network represents value, and that you transfer parts thereof, the actual equivalent the the banking "secure storage" function is the way your electronic wallet stores securely your private key(s). So the bank is your wallet. Or it's the company that is running your wallet for you (if your wallet is web hosted, rather than fully on your device). So this is the tricky part... You have to trust somebody (you trust the bank with your money, which it stores more or less in gold equivalent, or you trust the company with your keys, which it stores in a digital safe). And you have to hope that they don't misbehave with it.<br />
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Regulations apply to banks. But of course we've seen countries put in place regulations where banks are allowed to take some of the funds from their customer to protect themselves from bankruptcy... Regulations don't apply (today, in most countries) to companies storing Bitcoin private keys... and most (if not all) of the fraud around Bitcoin has happened when these companies misbehaved.<br />
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If you store your private keys in a digital wallet on your phone. If this wallet is open source, so that you can check by yourself (or have somebody expert in this kind of stuff validate it for you) that it doesn't misbehave with your keys, it's a lot harder for something unwanted to happen to your bitcoin funds. Yes, the bitcoin currency fluctuates, but all of them do. Some of them more than bitcoin. It's not designed for long term storage (unless you are very comfortable with risky investments), but more for doing short duration transactions. The current tendency is for the value of a bitcoin compared to a USD or a EUR to grow... so it's encouraging people to sit on their wallet. But it's not a guaranty.<br />
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What frightens banks is that bitcoins can be transacted by unbanked people (or machines - think IoT devices doing transactions by themselves). You don't need a bank account to use bitcoins. You need a piece of software. And a CPU to run it on (and some storage). So in a way, people can move away from them for some activities. When it's the unbanked, they're not losing customers... But when it's customers with bank accounts it's trickier. Still Bitcoins aren't replacing banks. They're complementing.<br />
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Those who are <b>really</b> losing money is people like SWIFT. Every transaction on the Bitcoin network is one less that banks would be paying SWIFT for. And it's going faster, and more secure, and cheaper, than SWIFT can do.<br />
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Bitcoins aren't replacing banks. They might make SWIFT obsolete (in particular when banks start using other blockchains as well for their own inter-bank, and intra-bank, transactions). They will make Western Union and their competitors obsolete (who wants to pay SWIFT several percent of a transaction as a fee when you can send bitcoins to friends anywhere on the planet, in 10 minutes, for fractions of a percent).<br />
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Banks? Well, safe deposit boxes are great to store paper copies of your bitcoin private keys in cold storage. :)Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-18006835790581014212016-04-26T09:07:00.003+02:002016-04-26T09:07:59.953+02:00It's much easier when you have a single target to attack...I often have this discussion with banks as to why they should really be using a decentralized, distributed, system to handle their transactions. Bitcoin is the obvious candidate, but due to its sulfurous nature, banks shy from it... Fine. Then they should (they are, actually) be looking at other alternative <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_chain_(database)">blockchains</a>.<br />
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Why is that? But more importantly, why the reluctance to use a distributed system?<br />
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Banks, historically, are used to the proven (sort of) model of the vault. One big, fat, tough, solid, vault, with all kinds of security measures around. Cameras. Guards. Walls. Traps... And big, heavy, solid doors with locks. That's something they know. They're comfortable with it. It comes with a known risk model. It's the central vault paradigm. Central to the bank. Sometimes there's one central to a branch office. It's usually deep underground and very secure.<br />
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That is until somebody digs a tunnel, or finds some other way to break into the vault. Once they're in it, they have access to everything. Very convenient if you want to steal it all.<br />
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When banks do transactions between each other today, they use something of a vault, as well... a centralized transaction platform. It's called <a href="https://www.swift.com/">SWIFT</a>. It's convenient, because it's managed by somebody. But really, it's a safe. It's a central vault (they even have a castle in La Hulpe, Belgium) that does all the transactions, in a secure (supposedly), controlled, expensive and slow way.<br />
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So naturally, when thieves want to do a major break-in into modern banks, the attack the modern vault. This is what happened when <a href="http://thehackernews.com/2016/04/swift-bank-hack.html">Bangladesh Bank recently lost $81M to thieves who attacked the SWIFT infrastructure</a> to get to the loot.<br />
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The alternative today exists. It's a decentralized infrastructure that is designed so that the whole network can be trusted even if you don't trust any single node in it. It does away with the notion of a vault, simply by being structured in a way that any misbehaving node in the network is naturally set aside and can't contribute faulty transactions... more importantly, by using a blockchain, any transactions that take place are permanently written in the network so that at any time, one can control the validity of what takes place, and what has taken place.<br />
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This is the notion of a permissionless blockchain network such as you can experience using <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/">Bitcoin</a> or <a href="https://www.ethereum.org/">Ethereum</a>. Try it out. Explore the possibilities. It's a great alternative to a centralized transaction processing network, it's fast, and extremely cost efficient...Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-8479277652422487262016-04-21T11:24:00.002+02:002016-04-21T11:24:54.811+02:00Is SWIFT trying to hide blockchain behind a cloud of smoke?<div style="font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">
I just read this <a href="http://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/education-center-2/swift-accenture-identify-critical-factors-blockchain-adoption">article</a> which explains how <a href="https://www.swift.com/">SWIFT</a> and <a href="https://www.accenture.com/">Accenture</a> are working on some new evolution of blockchain for finance.</div>
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<br />First notice how they try to use <b>DLT</b> (<i>Distributed Ledger Technologies</i>) instead of <b>blockchain</b>... I think they're trying to get people to look as far away as possible from <b>bitcoin</b> by using terminology as far as possible and as detached as possible from <b>bitcoin</b> / <b>blockchain</b>.</div>
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<br />Second... "S<i>WIFT works to evolve blockchain technology for finance and build the foundation of a production grade distributed ledger</i>" - implied: The current technology isn't suitable for finance, so don't use it. Better wait to have something made (and controlled) by SWIFT...</div>
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Why is this not surprising coming from them? They must be terrified of blockchain technologies... Think about it. Banks capable of doing transactions in a distributed, secure, efficient, low-cost manner, without having to have an expensive SWIFT in the middle controlling, and billing for, everything.</div>
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You bet SWIFT is going to try to evolve things so that they can get back in control...</div>
<br />Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-90519702858472691122016-03-24T11:52:00.002+01:002016-04-07T10:44:55.982+02:00Bitcoin adoption around the world...I just decided this morning to have a look at <a href="https://coinmap.org/">CoinMap</a> to see where people can use bitcoins to pay for goods do other transactions in my region. I decided to zoom out a bit and see the world, from a bitcoin users perspective. Here is what I saw :<br />
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The most obvious thing is that I won't be using bitcoins to pay for things in Antarctica or Greenland. But Iceland, definitely.</div>
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Now of course, it seems evident that the western world (and in particular Europe and North America) are big users of bitcoin. But note that even in China where the government had tried to make it illegal at a time, there are pockets of places where you can use it. South America has a few countries well covered. Australia on the Eastern Coast, South Africa. Quite a few places.</div>
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I know of people who have decided to go traveling around the world only paying with bitcoins (that includes hotels, food, traveling...). There's clearly quite a few places to visit. One of these people even went to the <a href="http://www.venusia.ch/">one brothel in Geneva accepting bitcoins</a> for payment!</div>
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And no... bitcoin payments aren't anonymous. They're very convenient, totally global, border-less... but certainly not anonymous.</div>
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So where are you going to use your bitcoins next?Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-92002260011236496632016-03-16T21:42:00.002+01:002016-03-16T21:50:01.237+01:00Why are banks terrified of using bitcoin?It's strange. All of the banks I work with are looking at blockchain. They're working on use cases, preparing pilots... and almost systematically I hear the same story. "We won't use bitcoin." or "We have decided not to use the Bitcoin network."<br />
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It almost feels as if bitcoin and its Bitcoin protocol and network are off limits to banks. It almost feels like in the 1990s when internet came around and all the banks were afraid to use it... and were all still strongly intent on remaining on their X.25 or Token Ring networks.<br />
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Yes, with internet, you see the source IP and destination IP... and you see the packet go through the whole world. Originally it was felt as terribly insecure, unreliable (despite of the design principles of the IP stack so that it can survive failures of nodes in the network and still route from point A to point B).<br />
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If you look at it closely, the Bitcoin network... you see the source address of somebody doing a transaction, and the destination address (those are actually publicly accessible by everybody on sites like <a href="http://blockchain.info/">http://blockchain.info/</a>). You also see the exact transaction that is being made. But, as an analogy to the internet, where you can use cryptography to hide the actual meaning of the packet sent, with Bitcoin, you can associate whatever meeting you want to a transaction (for example through tokenisation)... Say you want to prove ownership of a document, you can make a hash of that document, and send a small amount of money to the Bitcoin address that the hash makes up... and then you can at a later day, through finding your transaction back with sites like <a href="http://blockchain.info/">http://blockchain.info/</a> prove that you had access to that hash at the specific date the transaction was made). This is what the <a href="https://github.com/ligi/SatoshiProof">Satoshi Proof </a>application does.<br />
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It's even possible to build a completely decentralized network of distributed web sites using only the blockchain as addresses to connect to each site. This project is called <a href="https://zeronet.io/">ZeroNet</a>. It's not stored anywhere specific (it's distributed totally among machines connecting to it). Because of that, it cannot be censored. It's always accessible (the Bitcoin network has zero point of failure). And it has no specific hosting costs. Sites are served by all the visitors... Kind of like <a href="https://freenetproject.org/">Freenet</a>, but instead of using generic hashes for finding sites on it, addresses are actually Bitcoin addresses. The other difference... documents aren't stored encrypted. Unlike Freenet. It's all clear and open. Like the Bitcoin blockchain.<br />
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And the Bitcoin network is perfectly well design to provide resilience by redundancy like the internet. You don't have to trust any machine in the network to be able to trust that the whole network will process your transaction in a trusted way. This is due to how the Bitcoin protocol is designed. Pretty much like, with internet, the routing protocol is designed so that if the route initially planned to reach point A from point B has a node that breaks down, dynamically a new route is calculated and packets will still reach point B, but through a different path. You don't have to trust every node between point A and point B to be up for the packets to go through.<br />
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So what is terrorizing the banks?<br />
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Often they hide behind the "it's not regulated" posture. Then again, nobody regulates the internet (there are governing bodies... but no state regulates what is allowed or not on the IP network stack that makes up the communication protocol of the internet). If you look at a blockchain, a database made of chained blocks of data, no state on the planet regulates the concept of databases. There are some things you have to be careful putting in place? In Europe you have to be careful were you store personal data... But that's not really a database regulation, it's a privacy regulation. They are not saying what kind of database solution / architecture you may or may not use to store personal data... just what you can do with that data once it's stored somewhere (in whatever form).<br />
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I think the actual reason is that they are afraid of the <b>reputation</b> of Bitcoin. They think that by leveraging the Bitcoin network or the bitcoin currency, they will be associated with the perceived sole users of this, the criminals selling forbidden goods on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet">dark net</a> and its collection of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web">dark web</a> websites. Banks are so afraid of that association that in some countries (Switzerland is such a case), if you create a startup that works using bitcoin, and you want to have your bank account (not in bitcoins, but in, say Swiss franks), it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to find a local bank that will accept to be your bank. They are too concerned with being associated (even from far - they aren't storing bitcoins or doing bitcoin transactions - just being the bank that serves) with a company that for their business, somewhere else in their processes, uses bitcoins.<br />
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So what are they doing? Well... They are turning to alternative blockchain provides. <a href="https://ripple.com/">Ripple</a>, <a href="https://www.stellar.org/">Stellar</a>, <a href="https://www.ethereum.org/">Ethereum</a>/<a href="https://consensys.net/">ConsenSys</a>, <a href="https://chain.com/">Chain</a>... Or even looking at building their own blockchain platform (with the works of the <a href="http://www.linuxfoundation.org/">Linux Foundation</a> to create an <a href="https://www.hyperledger.org/">open source blockchain platform</a>).<br />
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Unfortunately, this has some inconvenients...<br />
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First, using a private blockchain, a permissioned blockchain, defeats the purpose of security by volume which you get with Bitcoin. It's close to impossible (as a security specialist, I never say <i style="font-weight: bold;">impossible</i> when it comes to security) to break the security model of the Bitcoin network. It was designed to be trusted even without trusting significant numbers of hosts. Actually to be sure to be able to insert fraudulent transactions into the Bitcoin network, you'd need to bring in about the same number of nodes to be sure to always have majorities for reaching consensus. Not feasible with the hundreds of thousands of nodes currently running on the Bitcoin network. With a permissioned network, you have to trust a security controler (which in turn becomes a single point of attack, a valuable target that you need to protect extremely well - raising the risk factor).<br />
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Second, using another permissionless network, like Ethereum. This is a great idea. But most likely for the wrong reasons. Ethereum is a fantastic network. Permissionless. But its interest resides in the fact that it enables things like smart contracts. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities of automated processing, distributed autonomous organisations like <a href="http://slock.it/">Slock.it</a>. But it's certainly not going to change the reputation. Ethers (the digital currency attached to the Ethereum network) has value. So it was bound to happen that you start seeing crooks offering illegal goods and asking to be payed in Ethers. This is today the case. You can buy your own attack bot / trojan and pay it in Ethers. You can find it on the ZeroNet I mentioned above.<br />
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So banks are terrified of bitcoin... for all the wrong reasons... and looking at alternatives that won't help with those reasons.<br />
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It's time to open up your eyes. Think back to 1994 (for those of you who were already there) and when internet started being available for commercial use. Think how everybody was afraid to use it for production. And look where it is now.<br />
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Well, the banks that start using the Bitcoin network and bitcoin currency today are those that will be the first to reap the benefits of what these tools provide, just like the first banks to build home banking sites and internet based network architectures were the first to reap the benefits of offering new products to customers and lowering their infrastructure costs.<br />
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So, as a bank, when will you realize that you too can reap the benefits of the Bitcoin network?Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-67406808900411316642016-01-27T09:03:00.003+01:002016-01-27T09:03:38.457+01:00Trusting open source with your life: CHECKAppart from space exploration, there are not many other mediums that are so alien to us that, though we enjoy exploring them, we couldn't live more than a few moments in them without very special equipment.<br />
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Water is one of these mediums. And when we dive, we are taking a controlled risk with our lives. Each time. Whether snorkeling or scuba diving, we need special equipment. And when we go deep with scuba equipment, we also need extremely precise, and reliable, monitoring equipment that will guide us during our dive and ensure a safe return to the surface.<br />
<br />
Well, even for this type of equipment, open source is there. There is a company called <a href="http://www.heinrichsweikamp.com/?id=362&version=en">Heinrichs Weikamp</a> that sells diving computers that run on open source. Check out their latest range of diving computers, the <a href="http://www.heinrichsweikamp.com/?id=121&version=en">OSTC</a>. The software running on the devices is (mostly) open source, and the source code they publish is on <a href="https://bitbucket.org/heinrichsweikamp/">Bitbucket</a>. That is true in particular for the <a href="http://www.heinrichsweikamp.com/?id=335&version=en">hwOS</a> firmware.<br />
<br />
It's not all clean and nice because though most of their code is GPL licensed, they are not committing to posting all of it. As they explain in their forums, some of their stuff isn't open source... and they make the decisions on a case-by-case basis, with a <a href="http://forum.heinrichsweikamp.com/read.php?5,12453">decision process which isn't that transparent</a>.<br />
<br />
All in all, this is a very commendable effort, and one can only wish that they had a completely coherent approach to their software open source strategy. They are a hardware company. They make excellent diving computers, and that is their know how. They can protect the hardware design as much as they want. Opening the source code of all of their software shouldn't be an issue.<br />
<br />
It's a great start, and a great show of confidence, trusting open source with divers' lives.<br />
<br />
<br />Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-33888262464567011672016-01-11T07:57:00.000+01:002016-01-11T07:57:17.489+01:00Open Source / Digital Ledgers / Blockchain - Why?<div align="center" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Note: </b>This article was co-written by my colleague Mary-Ann Francis, and myself. Its a bit lengthy, because we wanted to cover a lot of territory. It's initially designed for deciders who need to start almost from scratch about blockchain and bitcoin.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<i>Sometimes
called “a technology in search of a problem”, the blockchain
(often powered by open source) and digital ledger technology were no
accident, but it may still be missing is true purpose</i>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>A Brief History of
the Blockchain, Digital ledgers, and a Currency Called Bitcoin:</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
Back in the 1990s, when
the internet was still a new, unchartered phenomenon, a few people
set in motion a small revolution that is just now starting to rock
the world. Adam Back<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>,
amongst others, invented mechanisms, layered on top of an even older
technology, for the purpose of ensuring a fully trusted means of
writing information in a public ledger about transactions that, once
written, would be auditable by everybody, and impossible to falsify
or modify. The group leveraged a distributed database technology
called blockchain, supported by Adam Back's Proof-of-Work<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote2sym" name="sdfootnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a>
system called Hashcash<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote3sym" name="sdfootnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a>,
to guarantee the impossibility for individual parties to corrupt the
database with incorrect transactions. Hashcash was invented in 1997
and later was used for the underpinning of the Bitcoin<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote4sym" name="sdfootnote4anc"><sup>4</sup></a>
virtual currency when it was invented in 2008 by a person or entity
(no one really knows for sure) self-called Satoshi Nakamoto<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote5sym" name="sdfootnote5anc"><sup>5</sup></a>.
One of the key elements of the resulting blockchain ledger is that it
is extremely well protected against tampering or revision, and this
applies to even the operators of the nodes running the actual
system.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
To quote Ghandi <i>“First
they laugh at you, then they ignore you, then they fight you, and
then they accept you”.</i> As of today, this technology is sitting
between the last two points. Since 2008, when it was first used to
implement the bitcoin virtual currency, blockchain, and corresponding
protocols, has grown in adoption, either directly in the Bitcoin
system, or as other blockchain-supported systems. We now see both
startups and established companies implementing proprietary
blockchain systems, and some with a twist --like directly enabling
smart contracts<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote6sym" name="sdfootnote6anc"><sup>6</sup></a>
inside the blockchain. Others are running a blockchain inside a
private, controlled network<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote7sym" name="sdfootnote7anc"><sup>7</sup></a>,
rather than the fully open, global Bitcoin network.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>How the Technology
Works:</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
Just how is this all
possible? Mainly through the use of complex mathematics, including
public key cryptography. The initial concept was to create an
algorithm that is so complicated and computing-intensive that running
it would be time and processing-power prohibitive. The algorithm is
actually used to enable the validation of transactions on the
blockchain. The end-state results in rewarding only those machines
that run the algorithm in the specific ways that are coherent with
the information inside the blockchain, and that “agree” with the
rest of the systems involved. The systems that run these complex
programs are called “mining systems”. There are hundreds of
thousands of them all around the globe, and they all support a
synchronized copy of the blockchain ledger. In order to be able to
insert fraudulent transactions inside the blockchain it would require
as much computing power as there is present today to validate these
transactions such that a majority of systems would be capable of
agreeing. Bitcoin is now using more scalable and capable networking
compute power than SETI, the Search for Extra-terrestrial
Intelligence, which was the world’s previously largest networked
system<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote8sym" name="sdfootnote8anc"><sup>8</sup></a>.
Today, with the size of the Bitcoin network, it is simply not
possible, and that creates the term “a trustless network”;
because no entrant needs to trust any single node for the whole
network to be secure. The network is designed to be secure even
against a large number of nodes attempting to collude to insert
fraudulent transactions. It becomes trusted by being trustless.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: black;">To
</span><span style="color: black;"><b>emphasize</b></span><span style="color: black;">,
the "blockchain" is a database, journal or ledger that is
maintained as a linked list, with cryptographic signatures verifying
each entry. As a public resource, there's a risk of journal entries
being made too often (a bad thing for performance, especially over
time, creating a risk of DoS). To prevent this, every entry needs to
be accompanied by a token indicating the good standing of the
author. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: black;">Since
issuing tokens from a central authority defeats the purpose of the
blockchain, they are instead created by each author independently but
verifiably. For the Bitcoin blockchain and many others, the token
takes the form of a "proof of work" - a cryptographic
evidence of having solved a computationally-complex cryptographic
problem within a globally-identified sequence.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: black;">The
validity of each entry in the blockchain can then be independently
confirmed by every participant. In the case of the Bitcoin blockchain
and many others, this is done by every user replicating the entire
blockchain and then comparing new entries against the findings of
other users. A voting mechanism between replicas allows the "wisdom
of crowds" to identify and reject flawed or fraudulent entries;
trustless.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: left; widows: 2;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>Financial Services
and the Blockchain Today:</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
While this rising
distributed model is in play globally and across myriad businesses
and industries, for the financial services industry, in particular,
its use is challenging, frustrating and frightening. Legacy
processes appear threatened; risk averse and
legacy-technology-burdened operators are used to, and comfortable
with, a secure-vault model that contains a single point of entry,
deep in the basement of the bank; one vault with lots of security
around it. That environment is completely opposite to the blockchain,
where each of the hundreds of thousands of machines are a part of the
"vault", and there isn't a single one that has lots of
security built around it, but rather the whole system is designed to
be impregnable regardless of the security of individual nodes. Today,
players like SWIFT have a strong story of providing, to banks and
corporates, and at a significant cost, a closed, proprietary
environment that is “secured” by SWIFT, and the businesses have a
sense of security that transactions can be conducted safely in a
world that is trying to break into systems at every moment. Further,
in a traditional world where there is clear ownership and oversight,
there is an additional sense of security that comes with the
knowledge and awareness of a centralized authority ruling the roost.
In the blockchain world it is very different!</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>Blockchain
Varieties</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
A blockchain is
distributed and there is no central point of control. There are
public (also known as “permissionless”) and private (also known
as “permissioned”) networks. In a closed system, such as Ripple,
the number of hosts is limited, allowing the perception of better
control on each node. Conversely, the benefit of having huge numbers
of public mining systems that make inserting bad transactions
impossible, is lost. We end up again in a system where one needs to
trust the components of the architecture, rather than having an
architecture that is designed to provide the trust by itself.
Controlled environments a’ la Ripple do enable a network to
identify and block out a node that is deemed insecure, but not
automatically through the scalable model of Bitcoin. Both models have
pros and cons and enable different trust and transaction models.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
These public (or at
least shared, in the case of permissioned environments) ledgers
enable new ways of performing transactions between entities. First,
the ledger processes the full transaction in an irrevocable manner;
transactions are final once completed. All of the transactions are
visible on the ledger; all parties can control its existence and
validity. There is no longer a need for double-entry bookkeeping.
Transactions are fast to be processed (typically in the range of 10
minutes or so, depending upon the ledger). Transaction costs are
extremely low – usually under one percent. In the case of smart
contract transaction ledgers like Ethereum, it's possible to directly
implement contracts inside the ledger and all parties have visibility
to the ledger and can validate that the execution is according to the
control. Fraud possibilities are reduced drastically.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
Because it's almost
completely built on open source stacks, the barrier to entry to
working with blockchain technologies can be very low if you try with
some of the permissionless networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum. You
just need to get some well suited hardware, download the software
from the official project repositories, and run it, adhering to the
rules (for example, creating a smart contract on the Ethereum network
has a small token cost in its local currency – Ethers –
associated to it).</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
Vendors of commercial
permissioned blockchain solutions tend to have a higher barrier of
entry, but they often also come with convenient offers of service,
training, and integration, directly from the source of the product.
It may be an attractive way to start in this new field of endeavor.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>Applications of
Blockchain and Digital Ledgers</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
The most common
application of these public ledgers is virtual currencies, and while
Bitcoin is the most common and well known, there are other ledgers
that have been created each with individual specific. Two examples:
Dogecoin, focused around a charity; Peercoin, a peer-to-peer
cryptocurrency. Around these cryptocurrencies, there are all the
services one could imagine: payment terminals, ATMs, shop locators to
find places that accept these currencies, and of course, the now
almost ubiquitous wallet applications that run on cell phone and
tablets to enable payments, C2C, C2B, or B2B. There are even large
organizations that are starting to accept bitcoin payments like LOT
Polish Airlines<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote9sym" name="sdfootnote9anc"><sup>9</sup></a>,
or PayPal<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote10sym" name="sdfootnote10anc"><sup>10</sup></a>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
It gets interesting
when considering other types of applications, and its not always
about “payments”. Bitcoin is a protocol, a commodity, a
technology, a smart contracts system, a general ledger, and a secure
exchange. Consortia are focusing on all of these topics. For
currency/value transfers, banks are seeking ways to do transactions
between each other while doing away with the costly, slow,
centralized SWIFT network. An FI could implement its own shared
ledger (between a group of banks), or use the public Bitcoin
blockchain, in order to process transactions in a very fast, secure,
and extremely low cost. It's also possible to use the blockchain
(bitcoin or other) to process transactions like money transfers. The
continuing pain and saga businesses and banks experience over
cross-border payments are another highly visible target, with Ripple
at the forefront focusing its network on cross-border transactions
that belie the high cost correspondent banking network. There are
other startups that offer international money transfers/remittances
at very low processing costs that are leveraging another type of
blockchain business-- the companies that provide exchange services
between fiat currencies and digital currencies<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote11sym" name="sdfootnote11anc"><sup>11</sup></a>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
Given the low price per
transaction, and the very fine granularity, there are extremely
innovative applications underway, like Mycelia; developed by the
artist Imogen Heap<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote12sym" name="sdfootnote12anc"><sup>12</sup></a>,
it leverages the Ethereum blockchain to enable revenue generation in
small increments by monetizing the creation of small bits and parts
of music, dubbed Spores, and it is executed using smart contracts
implemented on the blockchain. Every time a Spore is interacted with,
the author receives the payment that was specified, by adhering to
the contract proposed. It's very similar to a micropayment mechanism
with extremely low cost, and dynamic, self-contained contracts.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>There are endless consortia experimenting with
the technology, here are some of the top use-cases</b></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>SWIFT</b>: “Bitcoin has the potential to replace SWIFT for financial transaction processing”, http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2014/11/will-bitcoin-replace-swift.html and the fact that SWIFT are highly inclusive of Ripple, Colored Coins, the Bitcoin community and more are open to dialogue and it shows that they are keen to highlight the import of these developments to the financial community”. Is it the collision of messaging and value transfer? Or the intersection?</li>
<li><b>Cross Border Money Transfers</b>: Still a huge area of cost and concern, especially for businesses in an ever-global economy, the blockchain offers the potential to bring real-time, irrevocable, cost-effective transfers. Pan-African payments, Europe-to-Africa payments, Africa-to-China payments. There is a theme.</li>
<ul>
<li><b>Remittances</b>: While associated with payments, remittances are typically P2P and specific to focused routes: to India, Mexico, Africa……</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Proof of Existence</b>: Highly targeted for document management: patents, licenses, deeds, titles, land ownership….</li>
<ul>
<li>Demonstrating data ownership without revealing actual data – publicly reveal the digest and if conflict arises, one can prove the ownership of the data that generated the digest; useful on copyrighted materials, patents, etc…</li>
<li>Document time-stamping: Prove certain data exists at a certain amount of time. The blockchain stores the document proof and can certify its existence without the need of a central authority. The computing power of the network certifies the data.</li>
<li>Document Integrity: Store a proof of document and later re-upload it, the system will only recognize it if it is completely and fully the same document. The slightest change, and the system recognize it is different, providing the security that certified data can't be changed.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Smart Contracts</b>: Smart contracts are computer programs that can automatically execute the terms of a contract. Someday, these programs may replace lawyers and banks for handling certain common financial transaction</li>
<ul>
<li>At core, these automated contracts work like any other computer program's if-then statements. They just happen to be doing it in a way that interacts with real-world assets. When a pre-programmed condition is triggered, the smart contract executes the corresponding contractual clause.</li>
<li>There are currently two major open source projects working on smart contracts, both of which have taken big leaps forward this year. One is called <a href="https://ripple.com/blog/codius-is-open-source/">Codius</a> and the other is <a href="https://www.ethereum.org/">Ethereum</a>. Codius was developed by Ripple Labs, which also created its own digital currency called Ripple. Codius aims to be interoperable between a variety of cryptocurrency, such as Ripple and bitcoin, although it is managed by the private company.</li>
<li>Smart contract technology is now being built on top of bitcoin and other virtual currencies—what some have termed "Bitcoin 2.0" platforms. Because bitcoin is itself is a computer program, smart contracts can speak to it just like they would any other piece of code. The puzzle pieces are falling into place. A computer program can now trigger payments.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Internet of Things</b>: Bitcoin is designed also to be used directly by computers. </li>
<ul>
<li>Integrating crypto-currencies into the production chain can enable machines to automatically order spare parts and directly pay for it. This increases efficiency in the settlement/administrative/accounting activities of companies on the whole of the value chain. As such, it can be seen as a key for making objects fully autonomous. In the IoT, everything talks TCP/IP. For the financial part there is also a need for an open protocol.</li>
<li>A blockchain ledger conceivably has other uses in IoT as well. It could be used to allow a cluster of devices with intermittent Internet access to collaboratively gather data in a way resistant to tampering. It could be used to distribute instructions to devices via ledger entries and then gather confirmation they have been followed. Anywhere a distributed data environment is appropriate, a blockchain could prove effective.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Models</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
One can look at three
large families of models for using distributed ledgers. Choosing the
type of model that will make sense is very dependent on what is
expected out of the use the digital ledger. It's very similar to
deciding whether to run I.T. in a datacenter in a private, hybrid or
public cloud. In the case of digital ledgers, here are the
possibilities:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<ol>
<li>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
The first model is to use an
existing, fully public distributed digital ledger. The typical
example being the Bitcoin blockchain. The advantage of this
“permissionless” model lies in the strong security due to the
vast number of hosts present on that network and the trustless model
that it is built on. The biggest disadvantage is that all
transactions are trackable, so it is potentially important to use
some kind of tokenization to avoid transactions being too easy to
interpret by an external observer. On this ledger, you can use the
digital currency bitcoin as a currency, or just as a token mechanism
to represent the transactions. Access to this network is free.
Permission isn't required. The only requirement is to get the open
source code for the node software and run it and connect it to the
internet, for each of the organization’s expected node on that
blockchain and to follow the rules for engaging with the blockchain
network. The resources of the rest of the blockchain will naturally
be shared; very similar to the model of the internet where, by
connecting, a common infrastructure is shared, and IP packets
transit through a totally public network.</div>
</li>
</ol>
<ol start="2">
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
The second model is to run a
private digital ledger, but using an Open Source, publicly
available, software. There are several to pick from, including
openchain<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote13sym" name="sdfootnote13anc"><sup>13</sup></a>,
which lets one run a private blockchain ledger, or run on an
existing ledger. This can be a good way to explore, and possibly
even grow to a large secure blockchain shared among a number of
participants that can start small and then grow to much larger. It
provides full benefit of open source aspects of the software,
including auditability, as well as the capability to make it evolve
to specific/tailored needs. In this permissioned model, only hosts
that are allowed by the operations controller of the network can be
active on the network. That permission may be revoked from any host
at any moment if they misbehave.</div>
</li>
</ol>
<ol start="3">
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
The third model is to run a
completely private blockchain using commercial products such as
Ripple that will enables a completely closed, controlled,
environment. This can be interesting as a learning environment, or
to create a controlled secure distributed ledger which is shared
through a small to medium number of participants. The benefit is
less than from the trustless model as there are fewer nodes on the
system, but there is usually a controller node that can implement
specific security policies. This could be the kind of setup used for
a SWIFT 2.0 type of environment developed by a group of financial
institutions. Like de model above, it is permissioned. Only nodes
that are allowed to operate on the infrastructure can do so.
Permission can be revoked at any time.</div>
</li>
</ol>
Note that in both models involving permissioned environments, the blockchain is really used as a glorified “transaction oriented” database that is shared amongst approved participants.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>A
Vision for the Next Five Years: </b>Sustainability and Scalability</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Public vs private
blockchains will be remain a significant debate for the foreseeable
future. There will be the advocates of running fully on the Bitcoin
blockchain (or any other public network) to benefit from the
scalability of the security model it provides, thanks to the hundreds
of thousands of nodes already present. And of course there will
continue to be advocates for using a private distributed ledger that
only authorized parties can connect to, and, as such, implementing
significant control processes. This is a model that may, at first, be
more comfortable for financial institutions who are used to the model
of a central vault with lots of controls around it to ensure it is
secure, legacy processes and platforms, and are subject to rigorous
risk, regulatory and compliance measures. But this is also a model
that offers a smaller perimeter of attack, a more focused one that is
the main target for attackers. It also is very similar to the
existing SWIFT model, again, with which financial institutions are
already familiar and comfortable, but which comes at a significant
cost. Many question the sustainability of a Ripple (closed/private)
network due to the scalability issues, but again, it can be a perfect
way to “learn and play”.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Payment channels<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote14sym" name="sdfootnote14anc"><sup>14</sup></a>
are a new way of using the Bitcoin blockchain to enable continuous
transactions, or micropayments, in a way that doesn't generate huge
amounts of movements on the blockchain, and can enable payment
increments of arbitrarily small value. This protocol is going to
enable all kinds of new models of operations on the blockchain. For
example, it will enable money exchanges between two entities that
don't trust each other. That is accomplished by starting two
channels, one in each directions, and by pumping into the channel,
one after the other, small increments of similar size. Even if one
kills the channel before the transaction is complete, the maximum
risk is the amount of an increment, so very limited and controlled.
It also enables models of pay-per-consume where, for as long as small
increments occur, the service is provided. The moment the increments
stop, the service stops. Example: watching a video = if the consumer
realizes they are unhappy with the service/video, it can be stopped
at any time without any issue.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
This
pay/trace-on-the-go model can also apply to larger transactions, such
as Trade, where heavily paper/labor intensive and time-consuming
processes can be monitored and acted upon incrementally, backing it
up with an escrow-like money movement and settlement.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>Why the Resistance?</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
The push-back is
constant, persistent, not always thoughtful or insightful, and often
misinformed. That has to be acknowledged. Rooted in legacy process
and bureaucracy, businesses in particular are slow to adopt, adapt,
innovate, CHANGE. The industry (and the media) is fond of mishaps as
much or more as successes. And while all can learn from mistakes,
not all mistakes occur due to the technology. Did an enormous amount
of bitcoins get “hacked”? Well, its best to not share/lose the
key associated with those bitcoins. Was a Bitcoin used to purchase an
illegal item? Maybe the item is the issue. If the laptop with
bitcoins on it gets lost/destroyed, was the laptop backed up? When
asked who there is to call?/Where is the oversight? We have the same
questions today if someone loses a wallet or the ATM card with the
PIN written on the back, or if the Brinks truck is stolen. The
blockchain needs that killer app that helped the internet long ago.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<b>What
to do? (And why?)</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
At this point in time,
there are still so many directions to explore with these new
technologies. Business have a tendency to want to develop an ROI with
a proven end-result, rooted in safety and an assured outcome. For
this technology that approach is backwards. Collectively, the
blockchain is exactly where the internet was in 1994 – and all are
still trying to explain it to the corner office. Innovation happens
on the fringe – and tools and apps are just under development. Not
one entity has scale, aside from Bitcoin, and, in reality, it is also
the only proven, existing use-case. And with an infinite spectrum of
possibilities offered, the only limit is the imagination of people.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
Today, since this
technology is still looking for it's definitive applications to
business, every organization out there is looking at exploring the
possibilities it brings by piloting various use cases that may make
sense for them. We have a role to play with our expertise in working
with open source projects and engaging with communities of developers
around the world, in helping our customers make sense of this new
world. We can monetize this value add we bring to them as they are
often learning at the same time to use both blockchain technologies
and the ubiquitous open source components that make the vast majority
of the code for these products. We have the expertise, the reach, the
vertical market knowledge to position ourselves as their key,
trusted, integration partner in these new endeavors.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
For end users, it's
just the perfect time to try out these technologies in safe-haven
labs, where all ideas are accepted and available for test. <i><b>Work
with a favorite and expert Advisor/Integrator, build a proof of
concept, and try out applications, fail, and then try again. Look for
usability, innovation, opportunity, not ROI, not just yet. </b></i>
Most of the code is available as open source, and that makes trying
it out simple, and at a reasonable cost.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
So, what will you try
to do with blockchain technologies?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Footnotes:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Back</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote2anc" name="sdfootnote2sym">2</a>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote3">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote3anc" name="sdfootnote3sym">3</a>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote4">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote4anc" name="sdfootnote4sym">4</a>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote5">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote5anc" name="sdfootnote5sym">5</a>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote6">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote6anc" name="sdfootnote6sym">6</a>https://www.ethereum.org/</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote7">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote7anc" name="sdfootnote7sym">7</a>https://ripple.com/</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote8">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote8anc" name="sdfootnote8sym">8</a>Chris
Skinner blog. Nov 2014:
http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2014/11/will-bitcoin-replace-swift.html</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote9">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote9anc" name="sdfootnote9sym">9</a>http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/2015/08/05/lot-bitcoin/31157095/</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote10">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote10anc" name="sdfootnote10sym">10</a>https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paymentshub</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote11">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote11anc" name="sdfootnote11sym">11</a>Like
the Swiss SBEX : http://sbex.ch/</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote12">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote12anc" name="sdfootnote12sym">12</a>http://imogenheap.com/home.php?article=2354</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote13">
<div class="sdfootnote-western" style="page-break-before: always; text-align: left;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote13anc" name="sdfootnote13sym">13</a>https://www.openchain.org/</div>
</div>
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2727612856191943402#sdfootnote14anc" name="sdfootnote14sym">14</a>https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments</div>
Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-28154722971636123142016-01-07T09:39:00.002+01:002016-01-28T13:35:51.520+01:00Banks and blockchain - Where's the innovation ?As part of my day job, I talk with a lot of our customers about open source and security, of course, but also blockchain technologies (<a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/">Bitcoin</a>, <a href="https://www.ethereum.org/">Ethereum</a>, <a href="https://www.openchain.org/">Openchain</a>, <a href="https://ripple.com/">Ripple</a>, <a href="https://www.stellar.org/">Stellar</a>...) and one common trend when I talk to banks about these things is that they are all trying to see how they can innovate around these newly (sic) available technologies.<br />
<br />
Innovation... And that is the key word. These banks, the vast majority that I've been talking to, are looking at their current business, and their processes, and trying to find how they can apply blockchain technologies to do what they've been doing for some time already... but just on a different medium.<br />
<br />
That's not innovation. That's just evolution.<br />
<br />
Seriously, it's like, when the internet arrived, banks progressively replaced their token ring, and other X.25 networks by TCP/IP networks. But they didn't change what they were doing over that medium. Innovation started happening when they realized, a few years later, that they could do things really differently, and completely change their model, by leveraging not just TCP/IP, but things like mobile phones, which emabled a completely new model where users held their bank branch office in their hands and finally could do (most of their) banking transactions from wherever they were on the planet, and that, 24 hours a day (the frequent traveler that I am appreciates this greately). Some banks thought that this innovation brought added value for the customer, and tried to bill their customers for using things like online banking (the French banks definitely were trying to do this) but others also realized that this let them save huge amounts of money and made it available for free (my Swiss bank actually reduced my bank account management fees to zero if I signed up for e-banking).<br />
<br />
What I am seeing today is that banks are looking at blockchain type of technologies and thinking "How can we innovate with this?" Of course, the idea is that they're all trying to be the first ones to do something new with it. But in reality, what I am seeing is that they are just trying to see how they can use blockchain to do, hopefully in a better way, what they've been doing before. Even the fancy effort run by <a href="http://r3cev.com/">R3</a> and the <a href="http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55f73743e4b051cfcc0b02cf/t/56727a13e0327c81fa9361ab/1450342931449/PRESS+RELEASE+R3+distributed+ledger+initiative+grows+to+42+bank+members+and+extends+reach+FINAL+.pdf">40+ banks that have joined their consortium</a> seems to be mostly aimed at providing the same kind of services SWIFT would provide, but faster, at lower cost, and more efficiently.<br />
<br />
What I fail to see today is banks looking at blockchain technologies and wondering "What can I do with this, that I've never been able to do before? How can I change the game? What new services can I, as a bank, provide, that nobody else has been doing before?" There are possibilities with things like Bitcoin that have never been there before. Take a look at <a href="https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments">micropayment channels</a>, for example. With this, you can imagine doing transactions between 2 people who don't trust each other, and limiting the risk, at any single point in time, to the minimum amount that the granularity of those micropayments enables. What can that allow people to do? Businesses to do? Banks to do? Who will be the first financial institution to leverage this?<br />
<br />
What else can you imagine, when looking at a fully distributed, extremely secure, totally open and public digital ledger, that you could do with it to change the world? That is where innovation will happen. That is what I would like banks to do. That is what fintech startups such as the ones hosted at the new <a href="http://www.fintechfusion.ch/">Fintech Fusion incubator</a> in Geneva, Switzerland, will no doubt do. And banks will have to play catch-up, afterwards...Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-30682115078434845352015-12-17T10:07:00.003+01:002015-12-17T10:07:39.038+01:00Secret Services on GitHubThe recent announcement of GCHQ posting the source code of their <a href="https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters/Gaffer">Gaffer</a> graph database on <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a> has made a lot of noise and generated a lot of heated discussions and comments on the internet.<br />
<br />
This is an interesting move on their side. It comes from the general idea that their work is funded by the citizens (through tax) so it should be made accessible to the society whenever possible. This is a very strong guiding principle that is found in many governmental open source programs.<br />
<br />
Of course, in the case of an organisation like GCHQ, or NSA, or other equivalent in other countries, there is always the question of their real intentions... Is the code riddled with backdoors that would let them spy on what people use the code for? What is their real intention in posting it?<br />
<br />
The nice thing is that since it's all open source, of course anybody can look at the code, audit it, and validate that it's all clean (or not) for their purposes!<br />
<br />
In any case, this isn't an isolated initiative. Here are some of the various (more or less secretive) governmental agencies that have published source code on GitHub:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters/">GCHQ</a> - UK - The code for Gaffer mentioned above.</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency">NSA</a> - USA - Not much stuff there. A placeholder?</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/ANSSI-FR">ANSSI</a> - France - Some cool tools to play with, over there! Probably the most interesting one!</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
If you know of other agencies publishing on GitHub, don't hesitate and comment with names and links, and I will add to this article!Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-35947796471660486002015-12-15T17:10:00.003+01:002015-12-15T17:10:35.669+01:00D-Wave Computers 100 million times faster than conventional computers... So what?Quantum annealing computers are designed to figure out solutions to problems by finding a minimum quantum energy level in a system. This works amazingly well for things like pattern recognition. If you've seen all these TV shows where the authorities have these fancy systems that will recognize individuals in a whole city, or track cars as they drive around a million other cars... that's the kind of thing a D-Wave machine can do. Can do millions of times faster than a conventional computer. NCIS: Los Angeles's "Kaleidoscope" thing... is a toy compared to what a D-Wave machine could do if put to the task. :)<br />
<br />
Now... while that's cool... since I've a cryptography background, let me tell you something more. D-Wave has a patent : http://www.google.com/patents/US7844656 that they filed several years ago (2006, but work was done 2005). At that time, according to their patent, they could almost instantly factor into prime factors a small number.<br />
<br />
Almost instantly. That's the magic of it. They didn't write a whole algorithm running step by step to do it. They did something magical. They took their machine, and they told it "See that simple multiplication algorithm, which any computer can do... Well, do it backwards." Now there is no conventional (Turing machine) computer that can run an algorithm backwards. Just not the way things work. A human can look at an algorithm, and might figure out a reverse algorithm in some cases to find a way to do it backwards... but multiplication, to date (Dec 2015) there is no other way to find prime factors of a number than to try all primes... all of them... one by one. The only optimization is to stop when you've reached the square root of that number. That's still a lot to try.<br />
<br />
D-Wave's system is limited (back in 2006) is small numbers. When their machines are powerful enough to do that on arbitrary sized numbers (and they keep coming up with bigger and bigger CPUs every year)... then we'll be in trouble. Why?<br />
<br />
One of the key cryptographic algorithms, RSA, is used in every browser, and almost every other encrypted communication, to establish encryption keys for secure tunnels. When you do "https" to talk to facebook.com, the session keys are exchanged with RSA encryption.<br />
<br />
To break RSA, you need to factor into primes some big numbers. Do you see the problem? Today, no computer can do it fast. No human can do it. Peter Shor, a mathematician, created an algorithm (dubbed "Shor's algorithm") that, when general purpose quantum computers are available, will be able crack an RSA key much faster than a conventional computer. The European Commission estimates that these kind of computers will be there between 2020 and 2030. If you have exchanged data that needs to be safe for more than the next 15 years (2030 is in 15 years)... then you're toast. Switch to something else than RSA.<br />
<br />
Now with D-Wave's patent... Shor's algorithm, which is just orders of magnitude faster than conventional computers, will look like a toy, because a D-Wave machine will be able to do it instantly.<br />
<br />
RSA encryption will be totally useless. Anything that has ever been encrypted with RSA (and we know the NSA is tapping encrypted fibers around the world today - probably just for that reason) will be totally open to anybody with such a machine.<br />
<br />
That is what is really impressive with D-Wave computers. And a bit frightening. :)<br />
<br />Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2727612856191943402.post-69696425933111968982015-11-09T18:56:00.003+01:002015-11-09T18:56:36.119+01:00What is your open source stratgegy?Most customers I see these days have a very tactical, or ad-hoc, approach to using open source. They have one or more products running in their data centers because they were there, did the job (addressing the specifications of the project), and they were cheaper than commercial alternatives.<br />
<br />
This works. It actually often works just fine. But you're not getting all you could from open source as you might, if you had a properly crafted, and implemented, open source strategy.<br />
<br />
Before we talk about the actual business value of open source, lets examine the four freedoms of free software, as these four freedoms are very deeply linked to what the business value comes from.<br />
<br />
The Free Software Foundation <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html">defines the four freedoms of open source / free software</a> by stating that free software gives is users (and this must be clearly stated in the license that comes with it) the four following freedoms (quoted from the above-mentioned site):<br />
<ul>
<li>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (<i>freedom 0</i>).</li>
<li>The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (<i>freedom 1</i>). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.</li>
<li>The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (<i>freedom 2</i>).</li>
<li>The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (<i>freedom 3</i>). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.</li>
</ul>
<div>
These freedoms are interesting because they let you do mostly what you want with the software, but what is even more interesting is the corollaries to that freedom. Let's examine some of the key areas where this is the case. My colleague Simon Phipps has <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/webmink/froscon-the-business-value-of-open-source">covered this in much detail</a>, so here again, I will summarize:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Open source puts you back in control of your financial agenda. You decide when, and more importantly, how you want to spend your money. You aren't totally stuck, under control of a software vendor who is free to decide when they will charge you more for the next round of license payments. You can chose to invest in training for your employees so that they can provide support services internally, and even so that they can contribute to the upstream open source project. You can decide to pay for support services from the product vendor, or a third party company that might, for example, provide a holistic support model for all your IT products.</li>
<li>Open source puts you back in control of your IT architecture. It's not when a vendor decides to provide the next feature update that you can finally do with your IT what you need to stay ahead of market evolution and trends. You can implement the new features that you need, if you have in-house competency, or through a third party integrator, when you want, so that you can move forward as fast as you need.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Those are the two most obvious, but think further than pure IT...</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Open source also has a significant impact on recruiting. Many of my customers (and I also recently heard an analyst say the same thing) find that it's much easier to hire great developers if you have an open source IT internal environment to offer to them. The best programmers out there are open source people. And in addition to being the best developers, they're also the most motivated. Not an excuse to pay them less (quite the contrary) but you'll likely find them working more, and often for all the right reasons!</li>
<li>Open source is also a great tool for corporate visibility. Some of my customers are leveraging their contributions to existing open source projects, or even go as far as open-sourcing some of their internal developments, because as a result of the community that takes place around these projects, they are seen as thought leaders in their field. This can be a significant part of their marketing / communication strategy!</li>
</ul>
<div>
If you look at your corporate objectives, from all angles, including how they may be expressed in terms of vision, and mission statements, it's sometimes almost trivial to find places where open source can directly fit in as one of the tools to help deliver on these objectives. For example, I met with a company who's mission statement includes wording about being the most inventive company in its sector. Well, that maps to innovation, and innovation is so much faster when development of new solutions and services is shared with a global community of passionate developers and, yes, users, which can help that company directly by proposing code that delivers the services that make real sense to the users.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So your strategy around open source could clearly include some elements that are linked to non IT corporate objectives.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There are many other things you need to look at... but I'm only listing a few, here, so you have an idea of the scope. Think procurement processes. Most corporate procurement processes are originally aimed at working with commercial vendors. I've seen some that state that before working with any vendor, you must put an NDA in place. Have you tried putting an NDA in place with a community? Nope. So you need to change that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Also, with commercial, proprietary software, running a Proof of Concept often requires purchasing a license of some sorts, and signing some coercive agreement with the vendor stating that you won't use the PoC beyond the scope of planned tests. With open source, you do what you want. Implement the PoC. If it works, scale it up to production. If that works, it's of course time to start talking to somebody for support... if you can't support it yourself (for example if you have, in-house, contributors, or even better, committers to the upstream project).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
With open source software, often, you find that your IT costs will move to an almost totally OPEX model (support, subscription, integration services, training...) rather than a CAPEX (upfront run-time license fees). Think about this and how this might impact your procurement processes.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Does your company have, or plan to have an open source office? It's good to, at lease, have a central point of contact for all questions relating to open source, so that there is always a coherent answer, and there needs to be a custodian of the open source policy. That can be an office, or a person with that activity as part of their role.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
One of the roles of the open source office, or officer, would be, for example, if you are a developer of several open source products, to ensure you have a structured, coherent, licensing strategy, where the licenses you pick for your product are selected so that they deliver on corporate objectives (do you want other developers to necessarily contribute additions to your code back, pick a license like the GPL, do you want to let anybody do mostly what they want, use the BSD...). Make sure your licenses are OSI-approved, and don't invent new ones (story from the trenches here, that I won't go into the details of)... there are already plenty, fully OSI-approved ones, to chose from! And make sure all licenses used inside each project are compatible with each other. Specialized lawyers may need to be involved in this last step.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
One of the good things of having an open source policy is that it protects you from external pressure from, say, proprietary vendors (of course, this should never happen, but we all know that the real world is different). For example, one of my customers in a former job had a policy that any database above a certain size should be running on a big proprietary database vendor's product (nobody's perfect)... but any database below that threshold must run on open source (hum, maybe the are perfect). Well, that's nice, because you can be sure the vendor was always telling them that they could run all the databases on their proprietary RDBMS, since they had one of the dreaded ULAs. But of course, if they did that, while at that moment, it might have no impact on their operational costs... you can be sure that next time the vendor was going to renegotiate their license... things would be different. So what they answered, every time, was "oh no, we can't, it's against our IT policy". Simple. Not debatable...</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So, think very well. Even if you're not a heavy user of open source or a full fledged open source software development house, put in place an open source strategy, formulate it so that it reflects your usage, and your corporate (even non-IT) objectives. Make sure the policy serves all of the corporation's goals. It will bring so much more than just cost savings. And if you need help doing that, my team at Wipro will be happy to help you. Just get in touch with us!</div>
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Gilles Gravierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374683443794882592noreply@blogger.com0