04
Feb
Do You Need a Blockchain? A very simple decision tree
A small list of four questions is the core of all checklists whether you need a blockchain.
Author: Roel Wieringa
18
Dec
Lessons Learned from the Rise and Fall of Bitcoin
15 min read The rise and fall of Bitcoin tells a story of greed, hope, disappointment, and fear. Bitcoin supporters aimed for a decentralized world in which payment is as simple as sending an email. They forgot that even the bitcoin network interfaces with the real world. The history of Bitcoin illustrates that to […]
07
Nov
Deconstructing bitcoin
7 min read Do you need a blockchain? There are several checklists to help you decide whether or not you need a blockchain. The most recent one is the Blockchain Technology Overview published by the NIST in October 2018. Others are discussed in a recent blog by Chris Hammerschmidt. All of these checklists ask whether […]
17
Aug
What are blockchains for?
A blockchain is a technology to implement a shared ledger that is guaranteed to be correct and unchangeable. But what are blockchains for? When do you need such a thing? Why not use a traditional database? Databases can store transactions and they can be shared. Database technology is mature and can achieve high transaction volumes. […]
07
Aug
IBM Watson, or how not to manage stakeholder expectations.
After IBM’s question-answering system Watson won the Jeopardy! Quiz on US Television in February 2011, expectations about its commercial applicability rose sharply. In 2016 several hospitals in Asia adopted Watson to provide advice about medical treatments of oncology. Watson would use millions of pages of medical textbooks plus data about a cancer patient to help […]
27
Jul
Blockchains need networked business models
Gurus predict that blockchains will have an impact comparable to, or even greater than, that of the internet. However, predictions are easy to make. Making correct predictions is very hard. A more fruitful exercise is to study the past to extract lessons learned. This is less attention-grabbing perhaps, but in the end, pays off more. […]
11
Jul
Blockchain can protect musicians from illegal publication of their work and at the same time preserve internet freedom
On the Thursday 5th of July the European parliament has postponed the decision to oblige platforms such as Youtube and Facebook to filter content placed by users so as to block material that is published without paying for intellectual property (IP). The goal of proponents of this filter is to protect the creators of content, […]