blockchain

The challenge of regulating cryptocurrencies

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Blockchain is one of the most promising fintech innovations of our time. It can revolutionize international finance. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to bring down the high costs of international money transfers down to almost zero. This would help millions of the world’s poor who depend on remittances. These developments would move us closer to achieving the global Strategic Development Goals. However, Blockchain applications have challenges too.

The foremost hurdle to the adoption of digital currencies is the issue of regulating them. Nations have taken widely different approaches to this. Some have burnt their fingers and others remain cautious. There are also a select few countries that are aggressively adopting and promoting digital currencies. Continue reading →

How Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies Will Change the Health Care Landscape

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blockchainThe first great frontier for blockchain technology was the financial technology industry. There, it has had varying successes ranging from major advantages like the bitcoin loophole system to great issues like the volatility of cryptocurrency prices. However, there is a new frontier where this technology seems to be making waves: the health care industry. There, it has inspired a range of potential applications. Some are achievable easily in a few years while others sound like the stuff of science fiction.

There is a lot of excitement in the global community about the potential of the health care industry. From governments to health care organizations, all of them are looking forward to achieving some of the many possibilities promised by blockchain technology.

The industry, however, needs to direct its focus on joining forces in the form of consortia dedicated to blockchain technology to foster partnerships in the ecosystem and create helpful frameworks and quality standards that will be implemented across health care systems on a massive scale. Continue reading →

Blockchain Makes Its Move Into Industries Other Than Banking

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blockchainMost people associate blockchain technology with the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The two gained fame around the same time due to ground breaking inventiveness. Bitcoin operates on the blockchain system, a distributed ledger technology. Aside from being the platform for cryptocurrency, blockchain is making its way into other industries.

Banking is one dominant industry blockchain has entered. Due to  system decentralization it creates transparency, security, and makes the middle man (the bank) nearly obsolete. Users are armed with a digital signature with which to make changes or transfers of data. Because everyone has unambiguous access to view the data it is a truly game-changing technology. Continue reading →

Are National Central Bank Digital Currencies A Good Idea?

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blockchainEllen Brown – Several central banks, including the Bank of England, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve, are exploring the concept of issuing their own digital currencies, using the blockchain technology developed for Bitcoin. Skeptical commentators suspect that their primary goal is to eliminate cash, setting us up for negative interest rates (we pay the bank to hold our deposits rather than the reverse).

But Ben Broadbent, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, puts a more positive spin on it. He says Central Bank Digital Currencies could supplant the money now created by private banks through “fractional reserve” lending – and that means 97% of the circulating money supply. Rather than outlawing bank-created money, as money reformers have long urged, fractional reserve banking could be made obsolete simply by attrition, preempted by a better mousetrap.  The need for negative interest rates could also be eliminated, by giving the central bank more direct tools for stimulating the economy.

The Blockchain Revolution

How blockchain works was explained by Martin Hiesboeck in an April 2016 article titled “Blockchain Is the Most Disruptive Invention Since the Internet Itself“:

The blockchain is a simple yet ingenious way of passing information from A to B in a fully automated and safe manner. One party to a transaction initiates the process by creating a block. This block is verified by thousands, perhaps millions of computers distributed around the net. The verified block is added to a chain, which is stored across the net, creating not just a unique record, but a unique record with a unique history. Falsifying a single record would mean falsifying the entire chain in millions of instances. That is virtually impossible. Continue reading →