Ibm Blockchain Quotes

Hyperledger.org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there.

Account reconciliation can benefit greatly from a distributed supply-chain solution. Using a permissioned distributed ledger to track and manage the more than 25,000 vendor disputes it handles annually, IBM said in 2016 that it had cut the resolution time of those disputes down from forty-four days to ten days. Essentially, record-keeping of payments and deliveries that all can view and verify in real time allows common agreements to be reached more quickly. This isn’t a chump-change problem, either. Those disputes currently tie up $100 million in capital every year, IBM says.

There’s still a problem here: we need to know that the device itself hasn’t been compromised at some point, that the machine’s own “identity,” going back to its origins as a pile of unassembled parts in the factory, can be trusted. It’s a hard nut to crack. Device manufacturers use the phrase “trusted computing” to describe their efforts to resolve it. It’s a concept that chipmakers AMD and Intel Corp. have worked on in concert with IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and others within a consortium known as the Trusted Computing Group. As it is currently designed, trusted computing is intended to confirm that a computer will act as intended—for example, that it will communicate the very string of text that the user types in, and nothing else, when certain keystrokes are hit—that is, that it has not been compromised by malicious code.

Provenance, a UK-based startup, advertises that it is using blockchain technology to “[b]ring to life the information and stories behind your business and products” so as to “[t]rack unique batches of products with verified claims from origin to consumer.” Walmart is working with IBM and Tsinghua University in Beijing to follow the movement of pork in China via a blockchain. Mining giant BHP Billiton is using the technology to track minerals analysis done by outside vendors. The startup Everledger has uploaded unique identifying data on a million individual diamonds to a blockchain ledger system to build quality assurances and help jewelers comply with regulations barring “blood diamond” products.

The Internet was originally built on trust,” write the authors of the IBM paper, Veena Pureswaran and Paul Brody. “In the post-Snowden era, it is evident that trust in the Internet is over. The notion of IoT solutions built as centralized systems with trusted partners is now something of a fantasy.” Pureswaran and Brody argue that the blockchain offers the only way to build the Internet of Things to scale while ensuring that no one entity has control over it. A blockchain-based system becomes the Internet of Things’ immutable seal. In an environment where so many machine-to-machine exchanges become transactions of value, we will need a blockchain in order for each device’s owner to trust the others. Once this decentralized trust structure is in place, it opens up a world of new possibilities. Consider this futuristic example: Imagine you drive your electric Tesla car to a small rural town to take a hike in the mountains for the day. When you return you realize you don’t have enough juice in your car and the nearest Tesla Supercharger station is too far away. Well, in a sharing economy enabled by blockchains, you would have nothing to fear. You could just drive up to any house that advertises that it lets drivers plug into an outlet and buy power from it. You could pay for it all with cryptocurrency over a high-volume payments system, such as the Lightning Network, and the tokens would be deducted from your car’s own digital wallet and transferred to the wallet of the house’s electric meter. You have no idea who owns this house, whether they can be trusted not to rip you off, or whether they’re the sort of people who might install some kind of malware into your car’s computer to rob its digital-currency wallet.

Para los dirigentes de Augur, el único límite de la utilidad de los mercados de predicción es la imaginación humana. En Augur, cualquiera puede hacer una predicción claramente definida sobre cualquier cosa con un plazo exacto, desde predicciones triviales, como «¿Llegarán a divorciarse Brad Pitt y Angelina Jolie?», hasta predicciones trascendentales, como «¿Se disolverá la Unión Europea antes del 1 de junio de 2017?». Las consecuencias para la industria de los servicios financieros, para los inversores, para los actores económicos y para mercados enteros son enormes. Pensemos en un agricultor de Nicaragua o de Kenia que no tenga medios para afrontar el riesgo cambiario, el riesgo político o los cambios de tiempo y clima. Tener acceso a los mercados de predicción permitiría a esa persona mitigar el riesgo de sequía o calamidad. Por ejemplo, podría firmar un contrato de predicción por el que cobrara dinero si una cosecha no alcanza cierto nivel o si en el país llueve menos de una determinada cantidad de lluvia. Los mercados de predicción son útiles a los inversores que quieren apostar una cantidad al resultado de acontecimientos concretos como «¿Aumentará IBM sus beneficios en al menos diez céntimos este trimestre?». Hoy, la «estimación» oficial de los beneficios de las empresas no es más que la media de las estimaciones que hacen