Blockchain 101
How Does Blockchain Technology Work?
As stated in our guide “What is Blockchain Technology?”, there are three principal technologies that combine to create a blockchain. None of them are new. Rather, it is their orchestration and application that is new. These technologies are: 1) private key cryptography, 2) a distributed network with a shared ledger and 3) an incentive to […]
What Can a Blockchain Do?
Financial institutions have financed the disruption of countless industries over the last 30 years; they have an idea of what a revolutionary technology can do to static incumbents. So, to stay ahead of change, banks have been proactive in setting up R&D labs, building test centers and establishing partnerships with blockchain developers to fully understand […]
What is a Distributed Ledger?
Ledgers, the foundation of accounting, are as ancient as writing and money. Their medium has been clay, wooden tally sticks (that were a fire hazard), stone, papyrus and paper. Once computers became normalized in the 1980s and ’90s, paper records were digitized, often by manual data entry. These early digital ledgers mimicked the cataloguing and accounting […]
Why Use a Blockchain?
As the implications of the invention of have become understood, a certain hype has sprung up around blockchain technology. This is, perhaps, because it is so easy to imagine high-level use cases. But, the technology has also been closely examined: millions of dollars have been spent researching blockchain technology over the past few years, and […]
How Could Blockchain Technology Change Finance?
This question has been asked by every futurist research lab in many of the largest banks, central banks, financial institutions, think tanks, consulting firms and government committees around the world. R3CEV, a consortium effort financed by some of the world’s largest banks, is busy trying to answer this question. Goldman Sachs, McKinsey Consulting and Consumers’ Research […]
What are Blockchain's Issues and Limitations?
There are treacherous passes in any technological revolution. Some people in the blockchain industry have pointed out that blockchain has become overhyped, when, in reality, the technology has limitations and is inappropriate for many digital interactions. But through research and development, success and failure, and trial and error, we’ve learned the current issues and limitations of blockchains. […]
Hard Fork vs Soft Fork
Last updated: 16 March, 2018 Forks, or the threat of them, seem to be an established feature of the cryptocurrency landscape. But what are they? Why are they such a big deal? And what is the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork? A “fork,” in programming terms, is an open-source code modification. […]
What is SegWit?
Last updated: 22 February, 2018 SegWit (short for Segregated Witness) is a protocol upgrade that changes the way data is stored. It was activated on litecoin on May 10, 2017, and on bitcoin on 23 August, 2017. Developer Pieter Wiulle first presented the idea at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in December 2015. Many hailed it […]
