would welcome debate of any of the 17 or any others at blog Investing in Millennials Goals and Collaboration Networks www.blockchainopen.com 

Investing in Millennials Goals and Collaboration Networks

three that stood out from the experts pick at Herein lies 17 decentralized technology predictions for 2017

Herein lies 17 decentralized technology predictions for 2017 By Andrew Keys Predictions on how blockchain technology will perform in 2017 by Andrew Keys’,Head of Global Business Developmen...

16. Asia will begin to flex its muscle as India and China roll out skilled blockchain developers, products, and capital

India is known for being the world’s hotbed of technical support and system integration. I foresee thousands of Solidity experts coming from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and other places from leading system integrators like Accenture, Synechron, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro.

China will also have deep developer pools, but rather than serving as the backbone to the world, their blockchain technology and brainpower will reside locally on the hundreds of Chinese smart city projects and internal banking applications which are perfect use cases for blockchain.

MIT- Yongling Li, Yanliu Lin and Stan GeertmanAbstract Since IBM brought the concept of “Smarter planet” in China in 2009, smart cites construction has become a new trend of urban development. By 2013, there were 193 approved pilot projects of smart cities in China. Smart city has been viewed as a key strategy to promote industrialization, informatization, and urbanization. The rapid development of smart cities in China is largely attributed to the cooperation between IT companies and the government. This paper will study how smart cities have been developed in China. It will pay particularly attention to the roles and relationships of various actors (including the government, market and society) in the development of smart city, which further divided into four layers, that is, sensor layer, network layer, platform layer and application layer. This article will finally summarize Chinese experiences on the development of smart cities and giving the visions of future development. 

12. As global energy markets continue to decentralize, their natural neural network will be peer-to-peer blockchains

In 2016 we continued to witness evolution, growth and progress across this interdisciplinary engineering science sector as energy technologies improve and deliver efficient, safe, environmentally friendly and economical extraction, conversion, transmission, storage and use of energy. As technology drivers accelerate we are also seeing the emergence of new business models focused on peer-to-peer interactions across the grid and this is precisely where Ethereum has a tremendous opportunity to add efficiency gains in 2017. As the physical infrastructure of the grid continues to decentralize and more prosumers come online, ConsenSys is working hard to re-imagine and build solutions at the business logic and transactional layers in an attempt to more elegantly describe what is happening in the real world as these changes occur. We are building next generation Ethereum enabled smart grid technologies with our utility and power production friends and partners all over the world.

2017 will be the year that the average person begins to understand that blockchains aren’t just an upgrade to our database and Internet, but rather tools to re-architect social, financial and political systems.

The key question asked will be: How much should we pay to trust each other?

Ethereum smart-contract blockchain systems will actuate near frictionless price discovery mechanisms for intermediation. Intermediaries like banks, accountants, notaries, custodians, trustees, agents may have to begin to find higher value propositions for customers as the cost of trust will plummet. The macro net result should be greater value to the counter-parties of a transaction and less value to the intermediary. Moreover, there will be anthropological research and writing on the value (or lack thereof) of the “middleman” in 2017 similar to the way Nobel laureate Ronald Coaseexplained efficiencies in “The Nature of The Firm”.

When a man is tired of quickfire blockchain pitch-offs, he is tired of life. And there was plenty of vitality and variety on display last night (30th March 2016) as 10 blockchain startups hawked their wares at London's Digital Catapult.

It's always good to see Bitnation taking a stand. "We are anarchists. We are very open about that," Abhimanyu Dayal, representing, told judges who wanted to know how governments around the world would respond to the prospect of being essentially outsourced to the blockchain. "It's already happening. We have signed an agreement with the Estonian government," answered Dayal.

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Bitnation believes that borders amount to Apartheid, and that human rights should allow jurisdictional arbitrage so that laws themselves can be appraised via a peer-to-peer system of reputation. It was also interesting to hear a pitch from "The Humanitarian Blockchain", a developing-world human-rights blockchain initiative, being built out of Bitnation.

One of two winners on the night, Blockverify, uses blockchain, QR codes and 2D barcodes to authenticate products ranging from luxury goods to pharmaceuticals. Provenance and supply chains have become a busy blockchain space, so it was refreshing to hear about a cure for counterfeit medicine. Pavlo Tanasyuk, founder of Blockverify, pointed out that 10% of all medicine worldwide is currently counterfeit, and as much as 30% in some countries. "If you think about these numbers, it's like three jumbo jets full of people crashing every day because of using counterfeit medicine."

Tanasyuk said that Blockverify is working with a large partner in the pharmaceutical arena and aims to facilitate new European regulations coming in 2017, whereby pharmacies would have to certify medicines at point of sale.

The Digital Catapult Centre in London

The other winner, as voted by the audience, was Smoogs.io, which does micropayments for digital content, pricing it "below the pain point of customers". Founder Neha Murarka provided a solid and well-measured pitch stating that the system would allow content, such as ebooks, to be sold in increments – a chapter or a page at a time.

She said that Smoogs.io was working with a couple of partners: one offering video tutorials and another, a self-publisher looking for alternatives to the likes of Amazon. Micropayments and cryptocurrencies are an intuitive match. However, it must be said this space is already rather well marked out by the likes of Satoshipay, which also offers slices of digital content of any size. That is not to say there's no room for more players within crypto and micropayments; clearly it's getting tougher to come up with untapped use cases within blockchain these days.

With this in mind, a must-mention is Creative Barcode. This start-up provides a blockchained record of intellectual property, but its USP (for my money, a winning proposition) is its focus on Unregistered Design Rights. Founder Maxine Horn's background is in design and the start-up has forged partnerships with leading agencies and institutions in that area. She said: "There are more than seven million unregistered industrial designs launched every year. There is no licencing infrastructure, no easily accessible design ownership data and no easy way to trade."

She added: "3D printing is going to disrupt the entire design and manufacturing sector. In the near future 3D printers will be affordable to consumers. So that's going to open up a whole new market to licence 3D designs, not just by businesses, but by consumers." Sadly, this is yet another application of blockchain that threatens to put lawyers out of a job. Sniff.

Also worth a mention was ICHAIN, an IoT application designed by Andrei Baloiu to preserve hashes of frames/videos in CCTV systems to the blockchain for additional security. Asked how pressing this use case was, Baloiu said that critical CCTV footage can quite often be tampered with or "lost". He had also rigged a Raspberry Pi to capture a frame of the audience, which was then added to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Ethereum Appcoin Matchpool CEO Suspected of Mishandling ICO Funds

By Jamie Redman -

 

April 8, 2017

 

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This week the Ethereum-based Matchpool CEO is facing scrutiny. The co-founder is accused of withdrawing Initial Coin Offering (ICO) funds from the project’s multi-signature account. According to sources, people witnessed 37 thousand ether leave the projects’ ICO address.

Also read: Markets Update: Bulls Test the Psychological $1200 Price Range

Ethereum Appcoin Matchpool CEO Suspected of Mishandling ICO Funds

Over the past twelve months, the cryptocurrency community has had a fervent relationship with Initial Coin Offerings and the tethered appcoins involved with these crowdfunds. Millions of dollars have been raised by ICOs, and speculators believe quite a few of the projects have little to offer. Another problem is people’s perception of fund management. One issue arose this week as the project Matchpool‘s CEO Yonatan Ben Shimon was accused of mishandling ICO funds.

Matchpool calls itself a decentralized matchmaking protocol that claims to use Ethereum smart contracts within its application. The project has a two-year roadmap and a token called “Guppy,” which “will play an integral role in its development,” the Matchpool team explains. With the projects marketing techniques and plans the Matchpool organization raised $5.7 million worth of ether in 48 hours during its crowdsale.

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Paul Sztorc @Truthcoin

ICOs are totally fine.. Nothing to see here!! Eth definitely not a scam!! https://twitter.com/NTmoney/status/849755116156600321 …

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37500 ETH Leaves Matchpool’s ICO Multi-Sig Address  

Shortly after the successful crowdfunding, one of the co-founders of Matchpool, Philip Saunders, detailed he was leaving the project. Furthermore, Matchpool investors were shocked to hear that $1.6 million in ether was removed from the ICO multi-signature address. Matchpool’s co-founder writes;

Over the last two days, 37500 ETH has been withdrawn from the multi-sig wallet by the CEO Yonatan Ben Shimon without any explanation or announcement due to the need for “hedging.” Yonatan keeps claiming he’s working with Bitcoin Suisse and it’s all ok, but so far I haven’t seen any evidence of this. I suggest you all demand and explanation and keep a close watch. In all likelihood your guppies are worthless.

‘Well Below Blockchain Project Standards’

The former Matchpool co-founder Philip Saunders who left the project.

Shimon and his team were initially silent about the withdrawal, and investors are afraid they might’ve been taken.

However, team members have stated that funds are secured in bitcoin due to Ethereum volatility.

The news about the Matchpool situation immediately went viral across the cryptocurrency community throughout many social media platforms. The co-founder who left the team, Saunders said Matchpool was “well below the standards needed for a blockchain project” and because of the lack of transparency, he must leave.

Matchpool team members are denying all “exit scam” accusations and explained the funds were converted to bitcoin due to Ethereum’s recent price dive.

One of the other Matchpool co-founders believes a screenshot of the funds on a Trezor wallet confirms the money is safe alongside an address with $1.7 million BTC. However, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are skeptical since Saunders has left with so many accusations on the table.

“We sold the Ether for Bitcoin to hedge against the volatility of the Ether price. We have the responsibility to build a great project and that is what we are going to do. You can see all the evidence of the cold Trezor wallet here,” Matchpool representative, Maximus Richardson explains.

We had a miscommunication within the team and I want to correct my original post. The funds were not sent to BitcoinSuisse. The funds were sent to a secure Trezor wallet, which can be seen below. It was a hectic day we’ve had a couple of sleepness nights so I apologise for the misinformation.

Matchpool has joined the ranks of the many appcoins who’ve raised millions in ICOs over the past year. Meanwhile, many have wondered how legal these types of crowdfunds are in the eyes of the law, especially after the DAO debacle last summer. With the Matchpool situation, it’s possible the funds were simply moved to escape volatility.

Yet, cryptocurrency spectators believe it is odd a co-founder left while leaving behind very serious accusations of shady activity. Exit scams in the crypto-world are not taken lightly.

What do you think about the shenanigans with Matchpool’s ICO funds? Let us know in the comments below.

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Images via Shutterstock, Matchpool’s website, Linkedin, and Twitter.

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