the blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution … · • bitcoin atms & visa cards rolling...

© Zühlke 2016

The Blockchaine-commerce/e-government revolution

The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution 9th November 2016 Slide 1

© Zühlke 2016

Vision

9th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 2

© Zühlke 2016

From Internet of Information to Internet of Value• Internet of Information

– TCP/IP = communication protocol– Revolutionised the way we exchange information– 1st use case: e-mail– Evolved to: Web 2.0, streaming, push notifications…

• Internet of Value– Blockchain = value exchange protocol– Decentralised trust: shared single source of truth– Promises to fundamentally transform business, economy, politics, public services and more– 1st use case: Bitcoin

• Blockchain replaces “trusted 3rd party” concept– People / organisations / systems can collaborate despite having no particular confidence in each other– No neutral central authority required– Though having some may confer performance advantages

• Why distribute trust?– Faster (e.g. Bitcoin transactions complete in around 10 minutes vs. some days using bank clearing systems)– Cheaper (e.g. Bitcoin charges average around US $10 per transaction, vs. 5-10% bank commission)– Fewer errors / more secure (too early to tell?)


© Zühlke 2016

History


© Zühlke 2016

Bitcoin


First successful (i.e. widely adopted) cryptocurrency• Launched in January 2009 following November 2008 publication on the Internet

• Combines tried and tested technologies successfully to achieve synergy:– Peer to peer networks: every node is a client as well as a server, holding identical copies of application state– Cryptography: distributed hash trees for both security and privacy– Proof of work: transaction validation is distributed to achieve consensus about which transactions to accept

• Peak value of $1216.73 per coin reached on Mt. Gox exchange on 17 November 2013• Reputation tarnished: FBI closed Silk Road in October 2013; Mt. Gox shut early 2014

• Low point: $177 in Jan 2015; $749 in mid-June 2016

• Mining reward halves every ~4 years (next: July 2016)

• Invention ascribed to “Satoshi Nakamoto”– Recently Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright claimed to be he – ?

• 2015/16: leading developers Garzik and Hearn bail out

• Bitcoin ATMs & Visa cards rolling out across USA

© Zühlke 20169th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 6

Bitcoin ATM

© Zühlke 2016

Other Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain applications• 1998: “b-money” paper published by Wei Dai, followed by “Bit Gold” by Nick Szabo

• April 2011: Namecoin launch, leading to NameID launch in June 2013– Flagship use-case: censorship-resistant control of the “.bit” TLD, independent of ICANN– Registration fees are paid in Namecoin

• October 2011: Litecoin launch– And hundreds more cryptocurrencies since then, notably Ethereum’s Ether

• March 2012: Hypernet – “next generation Internet powered by the blockchain”– Incorporates all the web sites and services of the wired and mobile Internet plus additional ones

• May 2014: Monegraph links Twitter accounts with digital assets to prove ownership

• September 2015: Blockstack launch– The first implementation of a decentralised Domain Name System on top of the Bitcoin blockchain– Being developed by engineers from academia and industry– Released as open source– Currently the largest non-financial system (by transaction volume) using the Bitcoin blockchain– Applications include OpenBazaar, which provides human-friendly names for stores in the “.id” TLD


© Zühlke 2016

Theory


© Zühlke 2016

Distributed Ledger


Ledgers have existed since the dawn of civilisation to record assets and transactions.

Until now, there could only be one definitive copy of each entry. Blockchain lets distributed individuals and organisations access and update a ledger without needing a central registry.

© Zühlke 2016

Underlying Model

• Shared Ledger– Generic term for any database / application accessed by multiple organisations; may be private or public

• Distributed Ledger– Spread across multiple sites / institutions / countries– Typically public; may be permissioned or unpermissioned

• Permissioned– One or more owners– Limited consensus check by trusted actors (e.g. government departments, banks)– Lower compute cost, hence higher performance

• Unpermissioned (like Bitcoin)– No owner– Global consensus check: anyone with the appropriate computing power and algorithms can enter information– Censorship-resistant– Global, unalterable record


A database shared across a network with multiple sites, in which all participants have an identical copy of the ledger. All updates are reflected in all copies within minutes or less.

© Zühlke 2016

Distributed Ledger

Taxonomy of digital ledgers


How many copies of the

ledger?

Who can use these copies?

Traditional ledger (e.g. bank account)

Permissioned, private shared ledger (e.g.

Bankchain clearing & settlement network)

Permissioned, public shared ledger (e.g.

Ripple global financial transaction system)

Unpermissioned, public shared ledger

(e.g. Bitcoin)

One

Many

Anyone

Any user,by untrustedconsensus

Owner group

Trusted ledger ownersor actors, by validationWho maintains

the integrity of the ledger?

Distributed Ledger

See note

© Zühlke 2016

How it Works (i)

• Hash algorithms include– SHA-256 (the early favourite, used by Bitcoin)– CryptoNight– Blake– SHA-3– X11– scrypt (the current dominant choice, with at

least 480 confirmed implementations includingLitecoin)


Cryptographic hashes are arranged in a Merkle Tree.

Hash (A+B)+C

Hash A+B

Hash A

Transaction A

Hash B

TransactionB

Hash C

Transaction C

© Zühlke 2016

What is a transaction?

• Transactions can be representedas directed acyclic graphswith four kinds of nodes– Input nodes– Output nodes– Input/output nodes– Transformation nodes

• Explore the block chains for examples

• Bitcoin Animation:http://dailyblockchain.github.io/

• Transactions have a time ordering– Determined by the consensus mechanism

• Transactions are organised into blocks


A transaction is a representation of an atomic change to the system state

© Zühlke 2016

How it Works (ii)

• Each block is a list of transactions (e.g. payments, grants of permission or ownership)• Each block is cryptographically linked to its predecessor in a continuous chain• Each full participant in the system has a replica of every transaction since the beginning• Each transaction on the chain is validated by all nodes

– If the majority agrees that a candidate transaction is true, a new block is created and added to the chain

• As the chain builds up, it becomes effectively impossible to rewrite older blocks


A distributed ledger consists of a series of blocks, each up to some maximum size.

Genesis Block HeaderHash of Previous

HeaderMerkle Root

Block 1 Transactions

Transaction ATransaction BTransaction C

Block 2 HeaderHash of Previous

HeaderMerkle Root


Transaction D

Transaction E


HeaderMerkle Root


Transaction FTransaction GTransaction H


HeaderMerkle Root


Transaction I

© Zühlke 2016

How it Works (iii)


The consensus mechanism ensures that only one possible continuation of the chain becomes definitive.

Genesis Block Candidate BlockBlock 2

Candidate BlockBlock 4 Candidate BlockBlock 5

Candidate BlockOrphan Block Candidate BlockOrphan BlockCandidate BlockOrphan Block

Candidate BlockOrphan BlockCandidate BlockBlock 3 Candidate BlockBlock 6

Candidate BlockBlock 7

Candidate BlockOrphan Block Candidate BlockOrphan Block

Candidate BlockOrphan Block

© Zühlke 2016

Consensus mechanisms• In a nutshell

– In PoW systems, you trust the chain with the greatest amount of computing effort invested in it– In PoS systems, you trust the chain with the greatest amount of money (collateral) staked on it

• Proof-of-Work (block mining)– Intrinsic part of the Bitcoin protocol– Highly compute-intensive – deliberately so to avoid any one party dominating the consensus process

– In practice, today there are a handful of bitcoin mining companies in China that do dominate the process– Fair

– a miner with fraction p of total compute resources has probability p of creating any given candidate block and winning the bitcoin reward

– Claimed to be less vulnerable to attacks than alternatives

• Proof-of-Stake (block minting)– Probability of creating a block is proportional to the user’s ownership stake in the blockchain system

– Stake is measured in terms of the proportion of the total cryptocurrency supply owned by the user– This can erode over time as more cryptocurrency is released or created

– Rationale: users who own the most cryptocurrency have the greatest interest in maintaining a secure network– Claimed to be more vulnerable to attack (http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf)– Ethereum’s planned variant, Casper, uses consensus-by-bet: malicious validators lose part of their stake

(https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/28/understanding-serenity-part-2-casper/)


© Zühlke 2016

Derivatives and Add-Ons

• E-Wallets

• Digital Signatures

• Cryptographic reconciliation of replica copies

• Rules and Smart Contracts – code that executes the contract directly

• Tooling: integrated development environments, testing frameworks, DevOps (ALM etc)

Optional Extras

• Granular access control, transparency and privacy (using multiple keys and signatures)

• Side Chains – networks isolated from the block chain until confirmed on the block chain– Fewer manual operations– Data subjects can control who gets access to their data (e.g. onename.io)– Applications include regulatory compliance, product traceability, service management, fake/fraud detection


Almost anything that currently exists on paper or in a database could be represented by a distributed ledger. To gain the full benefit of that, distributed Ledgers need

© Zühlke 2016

Cost

Cryptography is energy intensive:

• Transactions are aggregated in blocks that are attached to an existing chain of blocks using a cryptographic signature

• Anyone can add a block of transactions if they can solve a new cryptographic “puzzle”– In the Bitcoin protocol, fraudsters can’t certify their own transactions thanks to a compute-intensive algorithm– Certifying a transaction therefore has a cost and is rewarded in bitcoin (increasingly raised as transaction fee)– Winning bitcoin in this way is known as “mining”– Rewards diminish over time, so the money supply is strictly limited

• In the case of unpermissioned distributed ledgers, no other authorisation is required

• The UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser’s report on distributed ledger technology quotes an estimate that the operation of the Bitcoin system requires electrical power equivalent to the entire generating capacity of the Republic of Ireland


© Zühlke 2016

Some Unique Properties of Cryptocurrencies• Everything has a unique address

– Every user (users may have multiple addresses in their e-wallets)– Every transaction– Every block– The smallest subdivision of every coin

– Bitcoins are divided into 100 cents, each of which is 1 million satoshi– bits (0.001 BTC) and millibits are also used

– Ethers are progressively divided by 1000 as follows– finney, szabo, Gwei, Mwei, Kwei, wei (10-18 ether)

– Each address is a very long hex string generated using the hashing algorithm

• Transactions and even particles of “coin dust” are programmable– Thus they can represent any real or virtual asset – other currencies, land, intellectual property, precious items

• Transactions have a precise and usually limited cost– But if they invoke other transactions, those have to be financed too – to the Nth degree

• Transactions are visible to all, but can be anonymised– Zerocoin – anonymises transactions via temporary cryptographic value-tokens– As a Bitcoin extension, could support money laundering– Implemented in cryptocurrencies Moneta, Zerocash (now Zcash) and CredaCash


© Zühlke 2016

Example Applications



Colu

Bitcoin“dyeing”to representassets of anykind,especiallylocalcurrencies


Everledger

1 milliondiamondsregistered onthe block chainto provideindisputableevidence ofprovenanceandownership –moving on todo the samefor fine art


R3 and Barclays Smart Contract Templates: https://vimeo.com/168844103

© Zühlke 2016

Fully Distributed Real Estate Ledger

• Zühlke project, partnering with Validity Labs


Switzerland, based on Ethereum blockchain and toolset

© Zühlke 2016

Technologies


© Zühlke 2016

Vendors and Organisations

• Chain: https://chain.com – provides blockchain networks to partners such as NASDAQ

• Blockstream: https://blockstream.com – specialise in developing sidechain innovations

• HyperLedger: https://www.hyperledger.org – developing distributed ledger standards

• OpenLedger: https://www.openledger.info – exchange platform; many cryptocurrencies

• Guardtime: https://guardtime.com/ksi-technology – blockchain-based cybersecurity

• Ethereal Homestead: https://www.ethereum.org– Implements smart contracts: computer can verify or auto-enforce any type of business / legal agreement

• Eris: https://erisindustries.com – smart contract application platform based on Ethereum

• BTL: http://btl.co/ – building a next generation of business applications

• Billon: http://billon.cash/ – a digital cash solution for government fiat currencies9th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 26

As in the early days of dotcom, there are thousands of start-ups and open source projects. These are just a small selection.

© Zühlke 2016

Possible Impacts


© Zühlke 2016

Challenges and Risks

• Security– A cyber attack would have to modify multiple shared copies of the database at once, making exploits more

difficult– However, anyone who can find a way to legitimately update one copy of the ledger will be able to tamper with

all copies simultaneously – see non-reentrancy exploit that drained up to $60M worth of Ether from the DAO– Robust authentication and authorisation protocols are as vital to building trusted relationships as ever– Most common fraud attempt on Bitcoin’s blockchain: Double Spend

– simultaneously submitting payments to different replicas of the blockchain

• Education• Scalability

– Storage limits (Bitcoin’s blockchain has grown exponentially to over 72GB as of mid-June 2016)– Block size limits (Bitcoin is artificially restricted to 1MB, an average of under 1000 transactions per block)– Transaction frequency limits (Bitcoin peaks at 2-3 tps and there is frequently a large backlog)

• Privacy• Business models


We’re at the very early stages of building the protocol layers(remember the explosion of competing web services protocols 10-15 years ago)

© Zühlke 2016

Banking and Finance

• Ideal currency for criminal networks (viz. Silk Road, a digital black market, now closed)– But not as anonymous or uncontrollable as people initially feared

• Forrester (April 2016) forecasts that mainstream adoption by banks is 10 years away (http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450294191/Mainstream-adoption-of-Blockchain-by-banks-is-10-years-away)– Recommends treating blockchain as a “lab project”– Predicts phased evolution of the technology: irrational exuberance, rational assessment, practical deployment– Significant “network effect” – a critical mass of industry players need to participate in order to gain benefits

• In 2016, the central securities depository of the Russian Federation (NSD) announced a pilot project that will provide bond owners with a prototype electronic voting system(http://www.coindesk.com/russia-national-settlement-depository-blockchain-voting/)

• Swiss bank Vontobel’s tracker certificate lets investors bet on the BTC/$ exchange rate

• Many institutions researching and running pilot projects, e.g. reconciliation (a better FPS)– Santander InnoVentures published The Fintech 2.0 Paper: Rebooting Financial Services in mid-2015 with

Oliver Wyman and Anthemis (http://santanderinnoventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-Fintech-2-0-Paper.pdf)


Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) such as Bitcoin combine the censorship resistance of physical cash with the instantaneous remote value transfer of financial networks.


Retail Insurance Concept: https://vimeo.com/164542378

© Zühlke 2016

Plant

• Example: a farm tractor– Can authorise access to multiple farmers in an area, enabling a pay-per-use model– Can discover and pay for climate data– Can notify its manufacturer about necessary maintenance or repairs

• Example: industrial equipment– Can order new parts for itself with the guarantee that the device is genuine and has a maintenance contract– Can support new ways of financing such equipment– Can support new marketplaces based on the equipment’s performance

• Example: hire-purchase agreement (Visa / DocuSign pilot)– Fail to keep up the payments on your car, and the engine won’t start until you make up the missed payment


A linked Internet of Things, with a block chain as the framework to facilitate transaction processing and co-ordination among interacting devices

© Zühlke 2016

Commerce• Black markets

– Silk Road keeps springing back up– Plenty of competitors– Organised crime and terrorist networks can use exchange platforms to transfer cash almost untraceably

• NASDAQ Linq introducing dealing in as-yet unlisted shares using blockchain in 2016

• Commodity exchanges– Thanks to far lower overheads, trading premiums on small quantities can be minimised

– For example, DigixDAO trades gold digitally on the Ethereum platform: https://dgx.io/

• Digital asset exchanges– E.g. OpenLedger launched trading in DGX tokens (see above) on 28 April 2016

– We will probably see the emergence of completely novel digital assets in the near future, based on e.g. digital rights to original works, laying off risks, carbon credits etc.

• Peer-to-peer betting / gaming with payout guaranteed by smart contracts– See exercise, later on

• Ticket sale and exchange9th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 32

© Zühlke 2016

Novel applications• Secure key and certificate distribution (with escrow arrangements via smart contracts)

• Identity management (e.g. single sign-on for public web/mobile apps)

• Notaries are likely to go out of business– Anyone can record an agreement between any number of parties via the international Bitnation Public Notary

• Decentralised crowd-funding– Swarm – www.swarmbot.io– Koinify – recently closed down

• Next-generation social networks– Twister – http://twister.net.co– Synereo – http://www.synereo.com/

• LaZooz – decentralized real-time social ride sharing: http://www.lazooz.net/

• Rent cloud computing resources by the microsecond instead of by the hour

• One philosophical problem for any non-financial application – The underlying blockchain technology will always depend on its own cryptocurrency (e.g. bitcoin, ether) as a

means of regulating supply and demand of the distributed computing resources9th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 33

© Zühlke 2016

Government

• Collecting taxes (Estonia’s e-Tax system is based on Keyless Signature Infrastructure)

• Delivering benefits (including tracing and transparency of how international aid is spent)

• Electronic voting

• Issuing passports and other official documents (e.g. licences)

• Registering ownership of land

• Assuring the supply chain of goods

• Authenticating and improving the delivery of public services (e.g. health)

• Sharing records securely according to published and precise rules

• Ensuring the integrity of government records

• Allowing individuals to control and check who has access to their personal information9th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 34

UK is one of the ‘Digital5’ group of nations, which also includes Estonia, Israel, New Zealand and South Korea. Governments see opportunities in at least the following areas:

© Zühlke 2016

Trust Landscape

• Security and privacy of data held in distributed ledgers is a vast field of research

• KSI is probably the only widely trusted alternative to PKI available today– Quantum proof– Easy revocation– Sub-second verification– No need for a certification authority

• Various regulatory bodies in the music industry have started testing models that use block chain technology for royalty collection and management of copyrights around the world– E.g. MUSE being used as a peer-to-peer royalty payment platform by PeerTracks, a music streaming service

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogeraitken/2016/01/23/muse-leveraging-blockchain-technology-to-revolutionize-music-industry)– Considered “third generation” blockchain with faster transaction speeds, confirmations and scalability– Uses smart contracts to assert copyright and ensure that artists receive 95% of sales income

• The Chinese authorities are reported to be making efforts to establish their own digital currency (presumably with regulatory back doors)


© Zühlke 2016

Organisational and personal development

• We all need to understand the technology at some basic level– Opportunities and threats– Competitive landscape– Leading toolkits– Where to find the latest information

• Part of the business innovation portfolio

• Formulate a strategy – review and update it regularly as the field is developing rapidly


© Zühlke 2016

Smart Contract Basics

• Contracts can be written in many languages and compiled down to a common bytecode

• Each contract has– A unique address– Allocated memory, called a storage file, which persists across invocations and can potentially be very large– An account balance based on the history of transactions in which it has been involved

• Contracts “live” on the blockchain– Their bytecode is stored there (source code usually in a git repository)– The contract’s code is executed by the distributed virtual machine – i.e. blockchain miners– The contract’s state (“storage file”) also resides in the blockchain virtual machine

• A contract’s code is executed whenever it receives a message (transaction)– Either from a user or from another contract– Each contract can have multiple entry points (just like methods of a class)– While executing, a contract may read and/or update its storage, and send transactions to other parties– Include a method to cancel the contract and collect its remaining account balance, i.e. a termination clause


© Zühlke 2016

Exercise (i)

• Individually or in teams, point a browser at https://ethereum.github.io/browser-solidity

• Create a new document (top left button) and write a ScissorsPaperStoneGame contract

• Two functions are needed:– addPlayer(uint8 move) – provided the player limit has not been exceeded, accept the player’s stake of 1000

wei and store their choice of paper, scissors or stone (for simplicity, use values 1, 2 or 3 respectively)– NB in a real application, you would conceal each player’s bid (see universally composable commitments)

– revealPlays() – determine who has won (if anyone) and pay out the stakes accordingly

• In case you need help with the rules or your strategy, try reading this: http://telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11051704/How-to-always-win-at-rock-paper-scissors.html

• Hints:– Given that the stake is a fixed amount, you don’t strictly need to track the contract’s account balance– You will need a storage file comprising the the current number of players and the data about each player– The constructor function can be used to initialize the contents of the storage file– If you reject a transaction, you must return the value attached to it to its sender, otherwise the money is lost– The simplest way to determine the winner is a static 3x3 matrix


Paper, Scissors, Stone game played for a cryptocurrency stake

© Zühlke 2016

Exercise (ii)• When you’ve written the code and eliminated all error messages

– Select the Transaction tab in the right-hand pane (paper plane icon)– Set the transaction origin (sender)– Click the red CREATE button on the right-hand pane

– If your constructor takes arguments, there will be text fields to fill in first to supply their values– This will calculate the cost in “gas” of deploying and executing the function– Each function within the transaction can be invoked similarly

– Fill in the global message parameters at the top of the screen: sender address and value (1000 wei)– Fill in any function arguments– Click the function name– You cannot see messages sent by the contract, so use public variables to mirror transaction state, display debug messages etc

• Show a game being executed and paying out either party (or both if it’s a draw)

• Try to break the game– Stake the wrong amount– Use the same origin address for both players– Add a third player– Play the game again: what happens?

• Model answer: https://ethereum.github.io/browser-solidity/#gist=40042ea67d7ea0693c6ce0c0ca07b7f79th November 2016The Blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution Slide 40

© Zühlke 2016

Five Contract Types

• Database Contracts– Check permissions– Store data on behalf of clients

• Controller Contracts– Operate on the database contracts– Can add sophisticated optimisations, such as batching and distributed transactions

• Contract Managing Contracts (CMCs)– Track components of the system and handle communication between them to aid modularity

• Application Logic Contracts (ALCs)– Domain- and solution-specific business logic– Typically a client of multiple controller and application logic contracts

• Utility Contracts– Library functions, usually without dependencies or permission restrictions


Like any well architected application, a distributed app (DApp) is decomposed into layers– but note, there is no presentation layer

© Zühlke 2016

Web Sites

• Blockchain Hub: http://blockchainhub.net/

• Coindesk news: http://www.coindesk.com/

• Coin telegraph news: http://cointelegraph.com/

• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency news: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/

• R3 Weekend Read (monthly): https://www.r3cev.com/blog/?category=Weekend+Read

• Social gateway to cryptocurrencies: https://www.cryptocompare.com/

• Blockchain info: https://blockchain.info/– Graphical tools to help understand what’s going on with the Bitcoin blockchain

• Ethereum statistics: https://ethstats.net/

• Summary statistics and charts for many cryptocurrencies: https://bitinfocharts.com/

• Smart Contracts the Ethereum way: https://solidity.readthedocs.io and https://docs.erisindustries.com/tutorials/solidity/


A small selection

© Zühlke 2016

Books• Andreas Antonopoulos Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies (Dec 2014)

• Melanie Swan Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy (February 2015)

• Tim Swanson Great Chain of Numbers: A Guide to Smart Contracts, Smart Property and Trustless Asset Management (May 2014) – ignore the technical, use to find applications

• Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order (January 2016)

• Will Martin Anonymous Cryptocurrencies: The rise of bitcoin alternatives that offer true anonymity (June 2014)

• Alex Gorale How to Program a Block Chain Explorer with Python and Bitcoin

• BBVA Innovation Centre Innovation Edge issue 9: Cryptocurrencies (July 2015)

• BBVA Innovation Centre Fintech Series: Blockchain Technology (2015)

• William Mougayar The Business Blockchain (May 2016)


© Zühlke 2016

Articles and Reports• UK Government Office for Science Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond block chain

(https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf)

• Wikipedia Block chain (database) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_chain_(database))

• Goldman Sachs The Blockchain could disrupt everything (video) (http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/what-if-i-told-you-full/index.html?videoId=141040)

• Roland Berger Could the Blockchain replace all trusted third parties? (January 2016) (http://www.rolandberger.be/media/pdf/Roland_Berger_Blockchain_20160122.pdf)

• Vimi Grewal-Carr, Stephen Marshall, Deloitte Blockchain: Enigma, Paradox, Opportunity(early 2016) (http://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/innovation/articles/blockchain.html)

• William Mougayar The Global Landscape of Blockchain Companies in Financial Services (Oct 2015) (http://startupmanagement.org/2015/10/22/the-global-landscape-of-blockchain-companies-in-financial-services)

• Mike Hearn The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment (January 2016) (https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7)– claims that Bitcoin’s blockchain has ended up essentially worthless, and explains why


© Zühlke 2016

Events

• ChainConf London (5-6 Dec 2016) (http://skillsmatter.com/conferences)

• Block Chain Con London (Jan 2017) (https://blockchainlondon.com)

• European Blockchain Congress (April 2017, London) (http://europeanblockchain.com)

• Blockchain Dublin (June 2017?) (http://www.blockchaindublin.com/)

• Blockchain Amsterdam (June 2017?) (http://www.blockchainamsterdam.com/)

• Euromoney Blockchain Forum (June 2017?, London)(http://www.euromoneyseminars.com/details/8968/the-euromoney-blockchain-forum/details.html)

• Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers in Financial Institutions (London, dates tbc)(http://www.marcusevans-conferences-paneuropean.com/marcusevans-conferences-event-details.asp?EventID=22821)

• London Fintech Week (July 2017) (www.fintechweek.com)

• Marketforce – the Blockchain Summit (Oct 2017, London)(http://www.marketforce.eu.com/events/financial-services/blockchain-summit)


Lots of conferences take place worldwide. Upcoming ones in or close to London include

the blockchain e-commerce/e-government revolution … · • bitcoin atms & visa cards rolling...

Documents