[ad_1]
Our synthesis of the ups and downs and long-term future of decentralized and distributed accounting technologies.
17 January 2019 WWF-Australia launches the food control blockchain
World Wildlife Fund Australia has launched a "blockchain-enabled" tracking system to track food and other products from the source to the plate.
The goal, says WFF-Australia, is "to help companies and consumers avoid illegal, environmentally or unethical products while improving supply chain accountability and transparency".
The system, called OpenSC, was developed in collaboration with BCC Digital Ventures, part of the Boston Consulting Group. Allows you to add product details to a ledger at the point of origin so you can track the route to your final destination. For example, the position and time when a particular fish is caught can be recorded using a digital plate from the vessel, allowing consumers to verify that it actually comes from an MSC certified fishing simply by scanning a QR code using their phone .
Austral Fisheries, part of the huge group Maruha Nichiro, has agreed to implement the system through its fleet of Patagonian fish.
The system is not limited to seafood, of course. WWF-Australia intends to use it to certify other food and paper products to demonstrate that they are not the result of illegally harvested forests or forced labor.
"Through OpenSC, we will have a new level of transparency about whether the food we eat contributes to the environmental degradation of habitats and species, as well as social injustice and human rights such as slavery," said WWF CEO. Australia, Dermot O & Gorman, in a press release.
"OpenSC will revolutionize the way we also buy food and other products, allowing more informed decision-making by consumers, businesses, governments and industry."
Improving supply chain transparency is one of the main cases of use of blockchain technology outside the realm of cryptocurrencies. Recently, the Food Trust, a consortium led by Walmart, has created a product recall system that allows products to be traced back through the supply chain to their origin in seconds rather than weeks (see earlier in this blog).
Fedex is another company that considers decentralized registers as a way to increase efficiency in the supply chain. The managing director Fred Smith described the blockchain as "a chain of custody on steroids".
11/01/2019 China collapses on blockchain companies
In the wake of the delivery of the fines to the VPN users accessing the "international Internet", China continues to repress the anonymity of its citizens by targeting the numerous blockchain startups in the country.
The Chinese cybernetics administration (CAC) has announced new rules for blockchain businesses. These rules, which will come into force on February 15th, will require companies using blockchains to register their names and IP addresses with the CAC within 10 business days from the time the new regulations become law.
It applies to companies that provide public information services through blockchain services accessible via the web or mobile devices.
In addition, blockchain service providers can not "produce, duplicate, publish or disseminate" content that has been banned by the Chinese government.
Companies that do not comply could pay fines of RMB 20,000 – 30,000 (£ 2,300 – £ 3,500), while serial offenders should expect a criminal investigation.
The move is the latest in an ongoing crackdown on online freedom of expression by increasingly authoritarian Chinese authorities. Last year a group of students used the Ethereum blockchain to escape the attention of the censors and send messages to a prominent professor accused of sexual misconduct, and this could have shocked government officials, themselves. very sensitive to corruption allegations.
In October, the Chinese government drafted a regulation that would require users to provide their real names and national identity card numbers when registering for a blockchain service. The policy also requires that blockchain services remove "illegal information" before it can be disseminated among users, with the service providers needed to maintain user data backups for six months and deliver them to the police on demand.
Even China has banned cryptocurrency trading last year.
08/01/2019 The rollback attack allows a double spending of over 1 million dollars in cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic
Blockchains should be immutable. This is the point. With a blockchain-based cryptocurrency you should not be able to spend the same currency twice by rewriting the transactional record, but the exchange of Cryptocurrency Coinbase has noticed a currency, Ethereum Classic (ETC), where exactly this happened.
"On 1/5/2019, Coinbase noted a deep reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain chain that included a double expense," the exchange notes in his blog.
He continues: "As a result of this event, we detected 12 additional reorganisations that included double expenses, for a total of 219,500 ETCs (~ $ 1.1 million)."
This last figure has been revised upwards from a previous estimate of 88,500 ETCs ($ 460,000).
The problem lies in the weakness of the Proof of Work consent mechanism on which most blockchains rely for security. In these miners they compete to verify the transaction blocks, ultimately accepting to accept the longest chain of blocks as the "real" one and move on from there. This is fine as long as more than half of the miners are "honest" nodes. But if a dishonest miner with sufficient CPU power can choose a previous block and build on that, he can theoretically overcome the other miners, creating a longer alternative chain that the other nodes will ultimately accept as a true, effectively rewritten story.
So the dishonest miner could make a purchase from a merchant with his coins and then build a chain from a previous block that does not contain that transaction. Once the other miners have accepted this new chain as the canonical truth, the coins are still available to spend again. The unfortunate merchant ends up with nothing.
This is known as a rollback attack because the previous transaction was actually restored, it does not exist in the record. It becomes possible when a single miner or a cooperative pool of miners controls more than 50 percent of the CPU power. The risk is known since the beginning of the blockchain and is the reason why it has always been emphasized that mining should be as dispersed as possible. However, since it is now necessary to have specialized equipment and low-cost electricity to earn a living with mining, power has been concentrated in an ever smaller number of hands.
To make matters worse, with the collapse of the cryptocurrency price (the value of ETC dropped from $ 45 a year ago to about $ 5 today) many miners have given up and sold their equipment. This may have allowed some of the miners left to consolidate enough power to launch the attack.
Coinbase says that no funds were lost from the exchange, but for the time being it has frozen ETC transactions to prevent losses from hitting its customers.
20/12/2018 New group of standards for private blockchains announced by ETSI
ETSI, the group of European standards for IT, has announced a new group focusing on authorized registers – or private blockchains as they are often called. Members of the Industry Specification Group on Distributed Ledger Permits (ISG PDL) announced so far include representatives of Cadzow Comm Consulting Ltd, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, NEC Europe, Telefónica and Vodafone.
The group will review existing methodologies used to validate participant nodes, improve scale and throughput, reach consensus and automate the management and operation of the node, incorporating new search results as they become available. The goal is to specify an operational reference architecture of the authorized distributed ledger that can be used as a basis for the implementation of private blockchains for commercial purposes.
Unlike public blockchains such as bitcoins, where anyone can execute a node, membership of authorized blockchains is limited. Current use cases include interbank books in which each bank of a consortium operates a node or nodes. In this way, security and confidentiality are easier to provide, while some aspects of the "lack of trust" of a decentralized public ledger are lost. Instead, the governance of the ledger is the joint responsibility of its members.
ISG PDL will try to provide the basis for the management of distributed distributed registers in various industrial sectors and government institutions, collaborating with various regulatory bodies and open source projects in the arena blockchain.
The initial group meeting will be held on January 24th in Telefónica, Madrid, where officials will be elected.
12/18/2018 Facebook is working on a cryptocurrency?
According to a report by Cheddar.com, Facebook has quietly assembled a group of experts, academics, cryptographers and engineers with experience in blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
The group was inaugurated in April of this year and, as reported, now has 30 or 40 individuals. It is directed by David Marcus, vice president of Facebook Messenger and former president of PayPal. Many of his latest hires are also former employees of PayPal, while others have online payments background from companies like Google and Samsung. Some are former members of cryptocurrency startups – fueling the long term that Facebook is developing its own currency.
Facebook has spoken little about cryptocurrencies, except for the ban on posting ICO ads some time ago, and it typically remains tight-lipped about its plans.
"Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to harness the power of blockchain technology," a spokesperson said. "This new small team is exploring many different applications and we have nothing else to share".
It could be that Facebook is trying to emulate the Chinese WeChat – a sort of Facebook plus that includes an app for appointments along with a native payment system that has become so popular that small traders and even beggars are starting to refuse cash – while at the same time working to keep up with the competition of less centralized models across the board.
13/12/2018 Hyperledger adds 12 new members
Hyperledger, the blockchain project authorized by the Open Source, has announced 12 new general members including some major banks, consortia and cloud companies. The general members have some marketing and hiring opportunities and can participate in commissions reserved for members.
The last general members show a strong presence from China. They are: Alibaba Cloud, BlockDao (Hangzhou) Information Technology, Citi, Deutsche Telekom, Guangzhishu (Beijing) Technology Co. Ltd, Guangzhou Technology Innovation Space Information Technology Co. Ltd, KEB Hana Bank, HealthVerity, MediConCen, Techrock, we.trade and Xooa. These additions bring the total number of general members to 256.
Four new associate members joined Hyperledger this month: Blockchain developer association in St. Petersburg, Hunan University Business School, Sun Yat-sun University and Wall Street Blockchain Alliance.
Associated membership is limited to non-profit organizations, open source projects and pre-approved government agencies. There are now 16 associated members.
The new members were announced at the Hyperledger Global Forum in Basel, Switzerland.
"The growing community of Hyperledger reflects the growing importance of open source efforts to build corporate blockchain technologies in all sectors and markets," said Executive Director Brian Behlendorf. "The latest members show the growing interest and impact of DLT and Hyperledger".
A number of blockchain projects are based on Hyperledger; some of them like we.trade and the Walmart food supply chain system are featured elsewhere in this blog.
10/23/2018 Blockchain too immature for government use, finds the Australian DTA
The Australian government's digital transformation agency has raised doubts about the validity of blockchains for government purposes.
The DTA, to which 700,000 Australian dollars were assigned to investigate the technology, concluded after an initial research that in almost all cases the existing technologies are more suitable than the blockchain.
The agency worked with a number of government agencies to develop prototypes for the use of blockchains to provide services, including the Department of Human Services for welfare payments and commodity regulation.
Peter Alexander, CDO of the DTA said that it is worth keeping the technology eye, but that it is still too immature.
"Our position today, and this is an initial review, is that blockchain is an interesting technology that would be worth observing, but without standardization and much more work, for every use of blockchain you would consider today is a technology better, "Alexander said Tuesday at a Senate hearing, as reported by InnovationAus.com.
Alexander said that one of the main characteristics of blockchain, the potential for anonymity, is among the biggest obstacles.
"In general, when the government is busy with someone, we want to have a relationship of trust with them, we want to know who they are and give them personalized service," he said. "Blockchain is good for low trust involvement, you do not know who you are dealing with but you have a series of books that can give you some confirmation and support."
According to Alexander, the blockchain is the "top of the hype cycle", with the demand driven by industry.
"It would be fair to say that many of the big producers are pushing blockchain very strongly and that most of the blockchain advertising is coming from sellers and companies, not from governments, users and service distributors," he said.
10/23/2018 China bans the ban on anonymity
China is another country that finds the anonymity of the blockchain a problem. At the beginning of this year, Chinese students have coded sexual harassment charges against a prominent Ethereum blockchain professor to escape censorship in the country, having been blocked all posts on social media on the issue. The same technique was used to spread news about fake and low-quality vaccines, another scandal that the government tried to hide.
But the Chinese government has developed a new regulation that would require users to provide their real names and national identity card numbers when registering for a blockchain service, reports The Verge. The policy would also require that blockchain services remove "illegal information" before it can be disseminated among users. And according to the proposed legislation, service providers should also maintain backups of user data for six months and deliver them to the police on request.
China has been bullish on blockchain in recent months, with a commentator who recently said that it is worth ten times as much as the Internet. The country's technological giants are pouring significant resources into its development, citing the easiest trade and anti-fraud possibilities. But without the possibility of anonymity, a permanent ledger could also be a powerful tool in the systems of surveillance and control of the authoritarian regime.
China has also banned cryptocurrency trading at the start of this year, although apparently it has not been effective. The Ethereum Hotel has recently been opened in the country, accepting payments in cryptocurrencies.
Next page: UK leaders in blockchain distributions say Capgemini; Microsoft's strategy for decentralized identity; Gary Cohn joins the fintech startup Spring Labs; The Horizen privacy platform; Zones and Icons launch the registry to authenticate and track sports objects; Nick Szabo, inventor of the intelligent contract, on its evolution; Cases of use in the real world emerge; Driving license test based on blockchain issued by the Australian state
