Tag Archives: Ethereum

Ethereum and Arcade City could kill Uber

A few days ago Don Tapscott suggested the idea that the blockchain could cause the death of services like Uber and Airbnb.
And it seems like this is truly happening, as a service called Arcade City has officially published a press release where they “declare war on Uber over fare cuts and plan to replace drivers with self-driving cars”.

Arcade City is an open marketplace where riders connect directly with drivers. It only works via a mobile app, available for both iOS and Android. 

How it works

Let the company speaks for itself:

It works through the Ethereum Blockchain

Most importantly, Arcade City integrates the Ethereum blockchain.
During a recent interview with CoinTelegraph, Christopher David, founder at Arcade City, commented: 

“the main deciding factor was that the vision of Ethereum aligns precisely with our own vision of peer-to-peer transportation and distributed logistics”.

Where can we move with Arcade City?

At the moment Arcade City is active in the US.
These are the states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Washington D.C.
Drivers are also available in Australia; while Mexico, Canada and Sweden will be launched next spring.

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Amelia Tomasicchio
Screen Shot 2016 03 14 at 12.29.28 AM

Ethereum Launches Homestead

Blockchain project Ethereum has just launched Homestead, the first release of its software implemented at block 1,150,000.
ethereum launches homestead, homestead release
This new implementation comes at a time when more and more financial institutions and startups are revealing their interest in Ethereum and in creating projects related to the blockchain.
Just a few days ago, in fact, we talked about how Ethereum now is bigger than ever.

 

Special advisor at Ethereum Foundation, William Mougayar, explained that Ethereum processes almost 25,000 transactions per day: about 10% of the number of Bitcoin.

“You need to look at the growth of the Ethereum network via the growth of its nodes, sitting at 5,100 versus bitcoin’s about 6,000 roughly. That’s quite significant and shows the stability and global nature of the Ethereum network,” commented Mougayar.

Homestead vs Frontier

 

Homested is preceded by Frontier, that was released in July 2015.
Co-founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, Andrew Key, commented that Homestead will help users to expand their possibility on Ethereum and the simplicity that will allow them to be able to build proof-of-concept products.
Keys said to CoinDesk:

“Homestead’s arrival will begin to demonstrate the next generation of blockchain technology, whereby anything we can dream of, can be accomplished in a decentralized manner using Ethereum.”

 

 

“We’ve seen Microsoft and IBM doing projects on Ethereum. There’s a lot of coders. It’s exciting to see something you were in on in the early stages growing and bearing fruit,” said Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio.

 

Ethereum helps Car Charging

In Germany the startup called Slock is working with RWE on a project to use Ethereum for car charging uses.

This project debuted at the Lift 2016 conference in Geneva, Switzerland and it will play out within 2017.
According to the RWE, customers will use charging stations by accepting a smart contract programmed on the Ethereum blockchain.

 

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Amelia Tomasicchio
CarChargingviaEthereum

Ethereum used for Car Charging in Germany

A German power company, RWE, started a partnership with the Ethereum-based startup Slock.it, to develop proofs-of-concepts (POCs) using the Eth blockchain.

 

Germany supports green power

On May 2011 the German Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen announced the government’s decision to close all the nuclear power plants within 2022.
During an interview conducted by the BBC, in fact, Mr Rottgen commented:
 
It’s definite. The latest end for the last three nuclear power plants is 2022. There will be no clause for revision.”
So, RWE, company who provides coal and nuclear energy infrastructures in Germany, has now decided to invest money in a new sustainable energy and in an Ethereum project to reduce expenses.
To do so, RWE created a working team to test the blockchain technology to aim at trim costs by lowering expenses related to energy transmission.

Car Charging with Smart Contracts

 

In a recent interview conducted by CoinDesk, RWE Carsten Stöcker commented on a possible application of the blockchain: electric car charging stations that use smart contracts to authenticate users and manage the billing process.
“We would like to solve the problems and really push electric vehicle deployment forward by looking into establishing a seamless and affordable electrical charging infrastructure.”
This project debuted at the Lift 2016 conference in Geneva, Switzerland and it will play out within 2017.
According the RWE project, customers will use charging stations by accepting a smart contract programmed on the Ethereum blockchain.
Through this system users will save money thanks to a payment that is connected to the consuption of electricity during the charging, instead of paying according to the time connected to the station.

 

 

“What’s really exciting here is that people are going to be able to use smart contracts to contract with a machine directly, rather than contracting with a human being or a corporation,” he said to CoinDesk.

 

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Amelia Tomasicchio
Immagine 2

Ethereum is bigger than ever

During the past months cryptocurrency Ethereum was growing fast, increasing its value and consequently its own popularity.
Today the Ethereum price is about $9 (0.022 BTC) and it undergone very few changes with an almost always upward price.
Just in the last day Ethereum raised its market capitalization by 26%, reaching almost $730 million, representing more than 10% of Bitcoin’s market cap.
This behaviour is truly important as Ethereum is proving to be much louder than the other altcoins, reaching the market capitalization of all the other altcoinsll together, excluding bitcoin.

Microsoft Corporation certified Ethereum

Some days ago a startup who provides Ethereum softwares, BlockApps became the first certified company on Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS).
Director of Blockchain strategy at Microsoft Corporation, Marley Gray, commented:
“The simple, rapid and flexible one-click deploy of Ethereum blockchain architecture launched on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace enables enterprises and developers to quickly deploy a certified blockchain environment on Azure.”

But, what is Ethereum?

Created in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency and a blockchain platform who provides decentralized services.
  At the moment Ethereum is in the so-called Homestead phase, the second of the six phases of its rollout that they company planned. The other phases will be “Metropolis (Mist release), Serenity (proof of stake Casper plus abstraction, aka Ethereum 1.5), Ethereum 2.0 and Ethereum 3.0 that will focus on scalability”, commented Buterin during a recent interview conducted by Bitcoin.com.
Thanks to Homestead, said Buterin, “the risk of using the Ethereum platform is now substantially reduced”.

Open your free digital wallet here to store your cryptocurrencies in a safe place.

Amelia Tomasicchio
algorithmes

‘We’re All in on Blockchain’, says IBM

We are all in on Blockchain”: these were the words of IBM Director John Wolpert during the today Blockchain Conference in San Francisco. According to Wolpert the blockchain needs a more collaborative approach, which is not always guaranteed by the blockchain developers.

 

 

So it seems that the worldwide company IBM wants to ensure itself a leading role in the market solutions related to the blockchain.

 

In fact, IBM is working on the Hyperledger Project, an open-source blockchain led by The Linux Foundation. Presented in December, this project stars thirty companies including ABN Amro, CME Group, Red Hat and several blockchain startups.
“It’s amazing how many smart and genius people are behind bitcoin, but they miss some logic here. You don’t need to go from trusted to trustless on everything. I think that’s an honest disagreement. The Internet is a permissioned walled garden. Anyone heard of ICAAN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers]? It’s permissive, but it’s permissioned”, said Wolpert.
Hyperledger Project’s goal, he continued, is to be an evolution of the first generation projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that gather all the best projects that leverage on the blockchain together with all the stakeholders that will potentially use such technology. This is necessary if we want to have a widely used transactional protocol.
It has to be immutable and modular. It can’t be this is the consensus algorithm, this is the token, all of that has to be modular. It has to be scalable. Interledger-ing is important. You have to inter-op between chains and different things”, he said.
During his speech Wolpert also emphasized IBM’s experience in consensus algorithms and distributed computing during the last 30 years.
It’s thanks to such experience that IBM was able to conduct the Hyperledger Project, that Wolpert sees as the only way to bring all the different stakeholders to the same table and make them work together to build and open-source blockchain platform that can be used in many different areas, as it is for Linux.
We’ve been doing projects on every kind of blockchain. We’ve been doing that for a couple years and now we have a whole unit. We announced [we worked with] the Linux Foundation […] At that point, we went all in on blockchain”.About the author: Amelia Tomasicchio is a writer and a journalist of Bitcoin-related news and articles. She started writing about Bitcoin in 2014 and she graduated in Rome with an essay about movie industry related to Bitcoin.

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Amelia Tomasicchio
Altcoins part 2 HolyTransaction infographic

Infographic: Comparing Altcoins – Part 2

Comparing altcoins: contrasting five more cryptocurrencies infographic HolyTransaction

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jorge
ethermoon

HolyTransaction adds Ethereum


HolyTransaction is excited to announce support for a new cryptocurrency, as well as a renewed focus on our international customers. The last cryptocurrency that we added was Gridcoin, and now we have added Ethereum’s crypto fuel – Ether.

Ethereum is one of the most interesting decentralized projects that have been released in Bitcoin’s wake and we support its goals. Smart contracts can’t come soon enough!

Now, with HolyTransaction, you have:

– Send and receive Ether

– Ethereum server side wallet creation and transaction signing

– Set OTP for additional protection

About Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that users can use to run smart contracts. Smart contracts are applications that run exactly as programmed (with a Turing complete language) without the possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or 3rd party meddling. The Ethereum platform uses Ether as its “crypto-fuel.”

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Satoshi
devcon 1

Microsoft to Sponsor the Ethereum DΞVCON1 Conference

The Ethereum DevCon1 conference is set to take place on November 9th in London. In a recently published blog post by George Hallam, the Ethereum team announced that Microsoft would be one of the sponsors of the first-of-its-kind event. MIcrosoft and Bitcoin have had a somewhat strong relationship since the American company started accepting it last year. Now, it seems that “Bitcoin 2.0” technology like Ethereum is taking some of the institutional attention away from Bitcoin. Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of Ethereum, commented on the sponsorship:

DΞVCON1 is very excited to work with Microsoft and we look forward to having them in London.”Microsoft’s head of US Technology Financial Services, Marley Gray, explained more specifically why Microsoft had taken an interest in this international and decentralized technology event:“Microsoft is excited to sponsor and attend Ethereum’s DevCon1. We find the Ethereum blockchain incredibly powerful and look forward to collaborating within the Ethereum Community. We see a future where the combination of Microsoft Azure and Ethereum can enable new innovative platforms like Blockchain-as-a-Service. This will serve as an inflection point to bring blockchain technology to enterprise clientele”.

“Blockchain-as-a-Service” is a new term that we will undoubtedly hear more of in the coming years. Most everyone involved in the technology side of their business is familiar wit Software-as-a-service (SAAS) which has given rise to incredibly large corporations. In contrast, the service that the blockchain provides is removing the need for people and points of failure in the middle and back office. Smart contracts and blockchain-as-a-service obviously go hand in hand. What will be most interesting is if Microsoft’s potential use of Ethereum in their Azure platform is what finally prompts Amazon to get into the decentralized digital currency game. One can only hope.

Ethereum DevCon1 Is Bringing Interesting Companies and People Together… For a Better FutureAlready, it has been confirmed that not only will Microsoft be in attendance, but so will Nick Szabo. That is actually no surprise given that Szabo coined the term “smart contract” many many years ago and has become increasingly vocal on the internet as his pet idea has started to come to fruition. Smart contracts are a large part of Ethereum’s mainstream appeal, though the concept is still in the process of gaining momentum. The future prospects of robots and computers replacing humans for certain types of jobs has always been on the fringe of human imagination. The more you think about smart contracts, the more you realize that such a futuristic world couldn’t exist in a stable state without something like smart contracts. As panelists at the Money20/20 conference stated:

Cryptocurrency is the most natural way for machines to pay machines.

Bitcoin-inspired blockchain technology, of which Ethereum definitely is, has seen a lot of validation lately. Other Bitcoin-inspired blockchain technology like BitShares is also gaining traction, though not in the form of Microsoft sponsorships. Besides the fundraising and actual release of Ethereum’s Frontier alpha and a shaky first few days, the formation of a conference is a milestone that most “altchains” never achieve – not that there was any doubt that Ethereum would make it this far, anyways. After all, even Imogen Heap has even started using Ethereum, why wouldn’t Microsoft be next?

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Satoshi

Smart Contracts as new laws? Better handle with care

(Sole24Ore) “A contract is an agreement”, this was the mandatory phrase for starting a private law exam test after which we would discuss the conditions for its validity. Today, university memories are coming back as contracts are revised in technological form; indeed they’re called Smart Contracts. This brilliant intuition came from Nick Szabo who proposed them in 1994, even before Bitcoin and the diffusion of the Internet.
Let’s start with the definition:
“Smart Contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that obviate the need for a contractual clause. Smart contracts aim to provide security superior to traditional contract law and to reduce other transaction costs associated with contracting.”
The words in bold about automatic performance of the clauses is a source of opportunities and risks, questions and doubts. One thing is certain: A Smart Contract isn’t a contract, but only the part related to agreements performance.
Until now, when one of the contracting parties feels the other party didn’t respect a clause of the contract then a third party need to be called in order to settle the conflict. This neutral authority has always been a human one. Now, we rely increasingly on technology to facilitate relationships between humans, even if this could seem an oxymoron. Maths (or should we say cryptography) intends regulating any operation between each one of us, close or far, a known or unknown stakeholder.
How do technology and economy meet at this point?
If a contract represents the formalization of an agreement, how can we make it secure between parties that remotely agree and maybe don’t even know each other? The answer is
Smart Contracts based on Blockchain technology.
The contract then becomes an instructions set. If it can be codified, it can also be “computed”, i.e. if the conditions are satisfied, it ensures that performance is automatic.
It sounds like a futuristic scenario, but in reality the Internet of Things (IoT) includes this form of contracts for new services. All is fine, in the end “equal justice for all”, not only for those who possess the power. Eliminating all excess of human discretion which leads to long and inconclusive civil lawsuits is actually one step forward.
But in which direction?
If we choose the one that leads to no human discretion at all, the risk may be even greater. These systems are fascinating, they open up incredible scenarios, but they also are autonomous and immutable. This isn’t good, machines must remain instruments. They mustn’t have the last word. Otherwise this will be the first step on a slope in which decision power is given to machines. Instead, we would like machines that assist us in the decision-making process. We must leverage them but not be ruled by them. The variability of emotions remains a human factor that we shouldn’t give up.
The third party, not human, to which we entrust the performance of contract can’t always be mathematics. We hope for a coexistence with the practitioners: the new generation lawyer will have to know how to write a Smart Contract, for example translating the clauses into computer code as shown in the figure.
All this to emphasize the fact that Smart Contracts should be used to control the performance, and never to judge. New technologies require for behavioral models to adapt. . We must use them according to their usefulness, without extremisms. We will use these instruments but wisely, because we don’t live in a deterministic world. Not yet.
Author: Massimo Chiriatti, technologist and member of Assob.it

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Satoshi
Imogen Heap feature 009

Imogen Heap Releases New Single Using Ethereum

In a recent event at Guardian live!, popular music artist Imogen Heap talked about the release of her new song, Tiny Human, on the Ethereum blockchain. By working with BitTunes, Ethereum Developers recently demonstrated smart contract functionality by purchasing the song using Ether. Imogen started with just a thought:
And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I could decide what I wanted to do with my music, who I wanted to have it for free, or not have it for free?

She eventually found her way to the bleeding edge of technology and has now officially brought her music to the digital age with blockchain smart contracts.

Music Is Finally Entering the Digital Age

Since the days of Napster, LimeWire, and even iTunes, music has come a long way in the digital age. Before physical mediums for music storage and music playing were developed, the only way to purchase music was to buy a single listen in the form of (likely) an orchestra or choral concert. With physical medium such as vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and now MP3s, the business model changed to allow consumers to buy “unlimited” listens by having the music file. Newer services such as Spotify, Pandora, and 8Tracks have created a newer business model that returns to using the “listen” as the basic unit of measurement. Music ownership has progressed and regressed; however, the connection between artist and music buyer has only continually grown wider and wider. Imogen commented:

“…now, you get a download, but often it’s not connected to the artist in any way.”

Blockchain Technology Allows for New Possibilities

After talking about blockchain technology with her friend Zoë, Imogen realized that technology had finally reached a point where users could get a download that is connected to artists in a financial way. Imogen described her realization:“I realized there is actually a way that you can connect a file with its payment attached into a digital wallet. And so when somebody listens to a track — the technology is very close to being there — it immediately recompenses me, and then I can split it off to my choreographer, to Zoë for thanking her, to whatever, it can immediately go into their bank accounts. Instead of having to wait two years, sometimes, even more, for money to come back to me, it can be instant.”

It turns out that technology can benefit the fans, who can receive provable special attention from their favorite artist, and the artists, who can receive payments sooner and with less middle men in between. Imogen Heap’s decision to use Ethereum and blockchain technology now that she is free of the shackles of contracts made by record labels tells us something about the future. This same move toward smart contracts will be emulated in other industries. Ethereum, and by extension Bitcoin and blockchain technology as a whole, will change the world.

 About the author: Caleb Chen is a cryptocurrency advocate and research assistant at the Chamber of Digital Commerce.

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Satoshi