Tag: digital signatures

Please Believe My Database

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 2 Comments

I was reading Matt Levine’s Money stuff today and was struck by a thought. He writes:

“A national customs agency, for instance, might be happier approving shipments on an auditable open blockchain than in the proprietary database of a particular shipping company.”

This is interesting, but I want to take it one step further.  Blockchain or not, a record of events that have been cryptographically digitally signed, with references to previous transactions could be very useful.

If you are a company, and a regulator or agency asks you for your view on what happened, and you give the regulator an Excel spreadsheet or a normal database extract saying “Here’s what happened, I promise”, this is very weak evidence and can be tampered easily by deleting rows, or removing key words like the names of sanctioned countries, etc.

Continue reading “Please Believe My Database” →

In a nutshell: Ian Grigg’s Ricardian contracts and digital assets prehistory

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 3 Comments

I enjoyed listening to Episode 151 of the podcast “Epicenter” (previously “Epicenter Bitcoin”) featuring Ian Grigg, inventor of Ricardian Contracts and blogger at Financial Cryptography. Here are my notes – part transcription, with some edits. This one is a goldmine and covers many topics: bonds, contracts, cash, Chaumian e-cash, DigiCash, financial cryptography, Ricardian contracts, digital signatures, smart contracts, dispute resolution, Ethereum, triple entry book-keeping, oh my!

Misunderstandings and paraphrasing errors are entirely mine.

This gets fairly technical; if this is hard to follow, it may be helpful to read my introduction to smart contracts first.  Hmm, if it’s still hard to follow, also read about blockchains and bitcoin and Ethereum, and digital tokens.

Continue reading “In a nutshell: Ian Grigg’s Ricardian contracts and digital assets prehistory” →

On KYC and blockchains

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 6 Comments

INTRODUCTION

It’s official: Blockchains for everything!

KYC is a challenge that blockchains are being thrown at (see here, here, here). The premise is “KYC is a headache and blockchains are trendy”. However there is rarely much detail on the problem and insight as to why a blockchain might or might not be a good idea. I aim to explore this use-case more fully in this post.

Continue reading “On KYC and blockchains” →

The pros and cons of internal blockchains

The pros and cons of ientrnal blockchains
~ antonylewis2015 ~ 4 Comments

I am often forwarded news articles of blockchain experiments run by banks or large companies, questioning “Why are they using a blockchain for this internal use-case?”.

Given that a blockchain is meant to replace a trusted external third party, or is meant to create trust between entities who don’t fully trust each other, an internal blockchain seems a contradiction in terms.

However, many of the publicly declared experiments, pilots and proof of concepts have focused on blockchains for internal use cases, ie a blockchain where there may be one or more nodes, but all under control of the same organisation, often within one department.

Although there has been much recent discussion about public (permissionless) vs private (permissioned) consortium blockchains, there has not been much debate on the virtues of internal blockchains.

Continue reading “The pros and cons of internal blockchains” →

A Gentle Introduction to Blockchain Technology

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 18 Comments

This article is a gentle introduction to blockchain technology and assumes minimal technical knowledge.  It attempts to describe what it is rather than why should I care, which is described in other posts.

Shorter companion pieces to this are:

Continue reading “A Gentle Introduction to Blockchain Technology” →