Yet Another Blockchain App: Trustatom

Continuing my watch to see what applications emerge that actually use a blockchain to so something useful (and perhaps novel).

In yet another variation on a theme, Trustatom provides a variety of identification services built on a blockchain.  It’s difficult for an amateur like myself to navigate the blizzard of jargon, but they seem to be offering a digital signature system.  The “innovation” is to use a blockchain rather than a central database as the publication method.

As Tanaya Macheel reports in CoinDesk, the company wants to find “real world” uses for the blockchain, and, reasonably enough, focusses on something they know which is corporate applications.

One of their services is to provide partial sharing, e.g., only selected information.  This doesn’t require a blockchain, but I can see that keeping a central server out of the picture would eliminate one obvious source of subversion.

I have to wonder if this sort of partial sharing is useful in the age of “big data”.  In fact, passing this information around via the blockchain makes it available to data aggregators, who can correlate it with all their other sources.

I’m collecting all the different ways that the word “trust” is used in the crypto arena. Trustatom throws around the word, though I don’t completely grok what they mean by it.

Overall, I’m not sure if there is anything new here.  But there is room for a solid implementation of these ideas, so I’ll wait and see what happens.

Andreessen Changes Tune, Agrees With Me About Bitcoin

You know something’s happening when Marc Andreessen agrees with me.

Last week I declared that Apple Pay is the end of Bitcoin.

A few days later, Andreessen appeared to revise his endorsement of Bitcoin as the coming thing.  MA is heavily invested in Bitcoin, and has been advocating for it for quite a while.  Anyone hearing him earlier this year would be forgiven for thinking that he expected Bitcoin to be the thing in a very near future.

But at a talk for a commercial conference reported by Tanaya Macheel in Coindesk, Andreessen is quoted to say that Apple Pay is the big deal now, and Bitcoin will be the big thing in 5 or 10 years.

Andreessen also qualifies the significance of his investment, claiming that it is a long term bet, and 50% of his long term bets don’t pan out.

OK, claiming that there is a 50-50 chance that Bitcoin will be hugely important 10 years from now is actually a very reasonable thing to say.  It would be difficult for me to disagree.

So, hurray!  Me and Marc seem to agree about Bitcoin, for once!

Will his folks disinvest in Bitcoin?  I’d bet they move their bets to other uses of blockchain technology beside payment schemes.  But what do I know?  They are the big deal geniuses, so says the media.

Notes On The Splitting Of The Bitcoin Community

Just a quick note on the ongoing fragmentation of “the Bitcoin narrative”, which honestly isn’t a single story anymore.

Perusing Coindesk this week we see the same technology presented in very, very different cultural sagas.

Greenpeace (at least in the US) is going to accept donations in Bitcoin.  In a report in Coindesk, the emphasis is on “independence”, and actually talks as much about their non-corporate payment system as about cryptocurrency per se.

All is light and good, right.

Well we also see the run up to the trial of Ross Ulbricht, accused of operating the infamous Silk Road online market. The charges include various serious crimes involving money laundering, drugs, and arms dealing.  He denies all charges.

Coindesk documents a very strong segment of the Bitcoin community in a “survey”, asking the completely unbiased question, “a number of prominent names in the bitcoin space about whether they think Ulbricht would be widely viewed as a bitcoin martyr or the ultimate cryptocurrency villain if found guilty“.

The answers from this carefully selected group are uniformly fire-breathing, and all think he is a hero and martyr.  Whether you agree with the extremist ideology passed off as fact (and obviously I don’t), the point is that I’m pretty sure that people like Greenpeace and United Way have no interest at all in being part of any community that considers drug trafficing to be ‘peaceful’ commerce.

For that matter, honest companies and banks don’t want to be associated with such a “community”.  (Coindesk has a report about a big VC who claims banks are “worried” about Bitcoin–he’s right, but its not necessarily because they are afraid of virtual money, its as much because they don’t want to have to operate like the mafia.)

Clearly, anyone who is talking about “the Bitcoin community” as if it is a single, monolithic group or culture is just not correct.

This isn’t terribly surprising:  the technology is flexible and designed to be decentralized, so lots of people can use it however they want.  And they can incorporate it in their own stories, for better or worse.

Ideas For Mexican Peso Blockchain

Another potential approach to “the Remittance Problem“:  “digital Peso”.

Tanaya Macheel at Coindesk reports on some serious thinking in Mexico about using blockchain technology officially linked to the Peso.  The interview outlines several ways this could be used, in fact, envisioning three parallel blockchains, all tied to Pesos.

The notion is that this could help financial transparency and tax collection (which are definitely related).

And, naturally, this would be extremely useful for South flowing remittances.

Linking to the central bank and official currency would add a level of security and safety to the system.  Just as fiat currencies can be defended from speculators and bank runs, a digital peso would have the additional backstop of conventional currency:  in emergency, Pesos denominated accounts can be insured and backed by the conventional state banking system.

Very interesting ideas.  I like the way they are thinking.