In the early days of the web, I used to go hunting for Beatles Bootlegs. I scoured forums, emailed dodgy geezers, and swapped poorly encoded RealAudio™ files on USENET. The Beatles had recently released their Anthology series, and us nerds were desperate to hear more unreleased goodies. Sure, there were rarities and out-takes, but we…
Continue reading →User Stories From The Blokechain
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bləʊk ʧeɪn Noun: any technology which attracts clueless men User Stories are great! A simplified snippet to help you understand the problem you're facing. There are, of course, a vanishingly small number of genuine use-cases for the Blockchain. So cryptobores have to resort to ever more baroque explanations to sell their wares. I recently stumbled…
Continue reading →Security issues on ArtChain
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One of the problems with the BlockChain goldrush is that it attracts a lot of people who don't necessarily have the required technical skill to safely run a service. This in turn reduces trust in the ecosystem. I'd like to discuss ArtChain.info - "Certifying Art Using the Bitcoin Blockchain" - and the some of the…
Continue reading →How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain
by | | 37 comments | Read ~23,717 times.
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain", Verisart will ✨hand…
Continue reading →Decentralised Food Safety Reviews
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In most civilised countries, there is a central authority which inspects restaurants for hygiene and safety. Their job is, broadly, to stop people getting poisoned, falling sick, or dying. That's a pretty good feature of civilisation, I'd say. We think that most restaurant owners are probably good people - but it seems sensible to have…
Continue reading →Things For Which Cryptographic Signing Would Be Useful
by | | 1 comment | Read ~340 times.
Every time someone mentions BlockChain, I have to down my drink. Those are the rules. You see, most uses of Distributed Ledger are really just a way to get people interested in cryptographic signing. There's lots of money and attention flowing to projects which have no need to publish to an energy-inefficient global database. They…
Continue reading →Usability of Key Distribution in BlockChain Backed Electronic Voting
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I went to an event a few weeks ago where some leading BlockChain organisations were showing off the power of Distributed Ledgers and how they will transform society. Not one of them mentioned users. There was talk of investors, stakeholders, corporations, smart-contract-backed entities. But no users. No real people who have to interact with their…
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