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When entrepreneur Katrina Donaghy attended a Women in Blockchain meetup in New York City, there were a lot of things that surprised her."Well, first of all it was funny hearing my voice, being Australian.

I found my voice very different to everybody else's," Donaghy told HuffPost Australia. Accents aside, sitting in a room with over 50 female entrpreneurs inspired Donaghy to help bring the meetups to Australia and that is exactly what she did.

As a Co-Founder of Civic Ledger, an Aussie company that uses blockchain to generate market solutions, Donaghy was certainly the woman for the job."I just wanted to basically enable women who are interested in the technology to come into an environment where we talk about why the technology is exciting, rather than the how and the what," Donaghy said.

"I think if we understand [the] why, then we're able to create more stories and then take them into our own personal environments to talk about how we can start to implement this technology in our own daily lives."

What Is Blockchain, Anyway?Essentially, blockchain is an emerging technology that changes the way we organise information. This information, such as transactions and other records of trade are stored on a digital ledger that all authorised participants have access to.

Blockchain is a peer-to-peer trade system that means people can trade digital currencies and other commodities to each other, without relying on a third party to process that transaction. The fact that participants can see the progress of a transaction means they can trust the authenticity of the record.Both blockchain and Bitcoin have become buzzwords recently, but there is a lot more to blockchain than the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and is the most mature example of blockchain technology. Blockchain has hundreds of possible applications, from green energy to business solutions and humanitarian aid. The Women in Blockchain meetups encourage women to think about how this technology could be applied to their area of experitse.

The third ever Brisbane Women in Blockchain (BWiB) meetup will be held on November 8 and will be run in a Q&A style to make it interactive for the people who attend. People are encouraged to ask questions and seek advice from Donaghy and the meetup's guest so they might be able to translate this tech into their lives a little better.

Donaghy's guest for the next BWiB meetup is Dr Jane Thomason, CEO of Abt Associates Australia. Abt Associates is a company that works to improve the social and economic well being of people worldwide and Thomason is now working with blockchain to see how this tech could be used in the humanitarian space.

"I heard about Blockchain from my son, who runs co-working spaces and accelerators and I saw its potential and decided to figure out how blockchain could help us solve developing world problems that we have struggled with for decades," Thomason told HuffPost Australia."Blockchain offers immense potential for identity, energy, financial inclusion, remittances, supply chain, provenance and improving governance.

I have made it my mission to accelerate the development and testing and scaling of blockchain and other disruptive technologies to address global problems. I believe emerging economies will be able to leapfrog using this technology."



KATRINA DONAGHY

Katrina Donaghy are her guest Dr Lucy Cameron at the second BWiB meetup in September.

With the world changing rapidly, blockchain presents both opportunities and challenges for our society and these need to be considered. Blockchain is a disruptive technology however, this disruption could provide opportunities for both developing countries and the Australian Government.

"The speed at which technologies emerge has increased tremendously... Governments everywhere need to be on top of these emerging technologies and understand their disruptive forces.

For developing countries, disruptive change may bring unique opportunities to bypass the legacy issues that advanced economies confront, and help them 'leapfrog,'" Thomason said."Digitisation accelerates economic growth and facilitates job creation.

Now around two-thirds of the world's population have access to a mobile phone – this makes digitisation possible. Blockchain will be an enabler for cities to be more efficient and transparent. Governments must ensure the capabilities for digitisation are in place, and need to collaborate with industry, consumers, and government to foster an ecosystem where the uptake and usage of digital applications grow."



KATRINA DONAGHY

Thomason told HuffPost Australia that speaking at a BWiB meetup is an exciting chance for her to give back to the blockchain community and guide women on using emerging technologies in their own lives.

"As someone who started my own company and was a working mother, I can be a role model for young women starting out. I am also networked in the global blockchain community and I can help connect them to others.

Finally, I am a passionate believer that blockchain can be transformative and I want to inspire others and be part of making it happen," Thomason said.Both Thomason and Donaghy also believe that tech is an excellent space for women to develop careers.

This provides some of the ethos behind Women in Blockchain -- inspiring females speaking to other motivated women to build a conversation around emerging technology."I think that tech generally is an ideal area for women -- because it allows them flexible working hours and arrangements," Thomason explained.

"Blockchain is a rapidly emerging technology with new use cases emerging on a weekly basis -- that means opportunity. We need to create new stereotypes for women in tech who are smart, managing awesome tech and managing motherhood."



KATRINA DONAGHY

Katrina Donaghy speaking at the second Women in Blockchain meet up in September."I'm just interested in having conversation with my community here in Brisbane, but I am very fortunate because I am connected to a lot of the other women in Australia who are also founders or co-founders or immersed in blockchain technology in this country," Katrina Donaghy said.

"So, if we're able to understand the technology then maybe we're able to start having conversations with our leaders or people with decision making to start to question the status quo and start thinking about emerging technology to disrupt or even start thinking about new economies of the future.

"The third Women in Blockchain Meetup will be held 12pm Wednesday November 8 at Fishburners Level 2, 155 Queen St, Brisbane. Meetups are open to anyone -- woman or man, blockchain expert or complete newbie.

Read and discover more from Huffpost Australia here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/10/25/if-you-havent-heard-of-women-in-blockchain-its-time-you-...

Blockchain may revolutionize the way we do business nearly as much as the internet did. Here are seven benefits it can have for businesses.

While cryptocurrency as a speculative trade – and, to a lesser extent, an everyday payment system – is creating much hype, blockchain technology is where the raw potential lies.

For the most part, the undercurrent technology is lying low, taking a backseat as developers and industry leaders come to grips with what can be done with it.

But being in the background is in no way an indication of its importance.In fact, many are likening the advance of blockchain technology to the dawn of the internet, predicting significant economic and societal change.

This is due to the fact that, as a decentralized network, it stores identical blocks of information across all computer nodes in the network that owns a copy of the blockchain code.

The network as a whole jointly manages the database of information it contains.The significance? It cannot be controlled by a single entity, the information it contains cannot be corrupted, and the flow of information is completely open and transparent.

Benefits of employing blockchain technology in your business
While there is much still to be discovered about blockchain, and particular applications will be industry-dependent, there are some overall benefits.What is important to keep in mind is that you don't need more than just a general understanding of the backbone of the technology to consider its deployment.

 The personal computer first came on the market in the late 1970s, yet most people still don't have an extensive understanding of how it works. However, blockchain developers are in high demand, indicating that, cost-wise, there is still quite a substantial barrier to entry this early in the game.

Here are some potential uses of blockchain technology.

1. Smart contracts

If your business operations support an if-then agreement, smart contracts could be programmed to support execution and deliverables.

2. Cutting out the middleman
The sharing economy has been one of the most important business model innovations in recent years. Blockchain technology can effectively cut out the middleman, enabling peer-to-peer transactions without the fees attributed to the central organizing party.

3. Identity management
Ecommerce will be easier, thanks to more streamlined personal identification systems. An individual's sensitive information that is available online owing to online transactions can be managed more securely.

4. Supply chain auditing
With blockchain, a product's claims can be verified every step of the way, from inception to market, thanks to timestamped dates and locations. This will form an important part of ethical business practices in future.

5. Intellectual copyright protection
Thanks to the transparent, open-access nature of blockchain, the expensive, lengthy process of copyrighting intellectual property will give way to a much more affordable, irrefutable process. It will also transform owned electronic media, eliminating the exorbitant dues currently lost because of illegal file sharing and redistribution.

6. Data management
Everything free online comes at a cost to your personal data, which is shared with the company in question. Blockchain technology will empower users to choose to sell this information to interested parties and manage what activity-generated data is available online.

7. Transparent governance
Voting systems, for anything from unilateral internal decision-making to international politics, can run on blockchain in a process that is fair, universally trackable and completely transparent.

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Nor are they pipe dreams. For each of these use cases, there is at least one startup operating in the space.

Society has moved into the information age, and with the invention of blockchain technology, we will enter an unprecedented era of trustless business operations that will, as far as we can tell, be technologically immune to human corruption.

Blockchain technology will also continue to make doing business smoother and more intuitive, automating many tasks and eliminating many unnecessary costs.

Michael HenmanMichael is the owner of Venture Team Building. He has over 10 years experience as a trainer, facilitator and manager in Canada, Japan, and Southeast Asia. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, personal development, and creating great teams.
If you enjoyed reading this article, discover even more on Business.com here:https://www.business.com/articles/blockchain-uses-in-business/

The Internet and the blockchain are often compared as two technologies that have disrupted much of global finance and economics. That is not the only similarity that these technologies share; in fact, blockchain can be considered, as proposed by venture capital investor Tim Draper, a new Internet.

The Internet is a centralized system involving many actors, with no unified consensus mechanism. As a result, there are many different systems and components that do not communicate; for instance, one’s identity on Github as compared to his identity on LinkedIn may be drastically different.


The basic structure of the blockchain is its address or public key: the very mechanism that allows users to transfer funds and work with digital agreements called smart contracts. Similarly, the Internet runs on a server with a public IP address. Since no public information about this address exists, it is merely a point to which one can connect and execute certain actions.

The main area in which blockchain and the Internet differ is in the number of services they require to operate. For instance, a web site needs a domain name, which is then assigned to the DNS and indexed in a search engine; an SSL certificate for the security of users; and functional content that is used directly.

On the blockchain, any person or company with a profile rating reflecting some digital essence of trust, including the history of the transactions of the user — similar to a Google search history log. In this record, users can link to the necessary “certificates,” such as pages on Github, LinkedIn, and Facebook similar to how SSL certificates are linked on websites. Furthermore, in new Ethereum update, called Byzantium, such links will be very cheap, even cheaper than purchasing web domains.

Each profile, as a smart contract, will be able to contain all user information in one economic unit, make deals with other profiles, arbitrage and be arbitraged, and most importantly, connect to different rating networks. Rating networks will be a blockchain representation of an organization unit where we have some score based on different factors, including job and academic performance.

Simply put, all users in the network will be able to see how successful you are.

Of course, any company or organization unit will have rating networks too, such as rating various marketplaces or creating a political legitimacy rating. Such updates will play a pivotal role in making our democratic societies more open, trustworthy, and transparent.

Blockchain is in its early stages of development. As much as it’s been compared to the Internet, one of its primary advantages is that it represents an opportunity to start from scratch: to design anything we want and develop our own standards. By letting users work on their profiles within the blockchain network, it gives them the chance to create a full-fledged economic unit, or “digital passport.” Each user, whether this is a company or an individual, will now be able to carry out transactions between other individuals.

In addition, the rating and history of their profile will be much more informative and more trusted, but also immutable. This final rating will be more reliable than a work reference, tax filing, or credit history, chiefly because it will be impossible to forge. This will offer new projects the ability to forge the path of their own destiny in the age of the digital economy.

While the advent of the Internet offered the possibility of increased connectivity, blockchain has the potential to take this to the next step by providing the world with a way to become fully digital. When transactions and marketplaces have become completely digitized, the creation of fully decentralized and trustless societies becomes a very real possibility.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Nasdaq has covered more articles and reports on blockchain development. See more here: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/how-blockchain-will-enable-the-creation-of-fully-digital-identities-an...

You may not have noticed, but a huge global movement is well on its way to creating the next generation of the internet.


This massive technological sea change is largely being driven by a key innovation in database technology called the blockchain, and many forecasters are predicting that it could cause as much social transformation as the introduction of the world-wide web twenty-six years ago.

What is a blockchain? In short, it is a disintermediating technology. In other words, it removes the need for middlemen and trusted third-parties.


When combined with other technologies, blockchains have the potential to disintermediate many areas of life, from banking to information storage to voting to the making and sharing of goods and services.

It is tempting to use the word revolution, and plenty of people do: a simple Google search returns 3.1 million results for “blockchain revolution.” But that misrepresents the situation. In truth, what the blockchain offers is a renaissance.


The difference is that where revolutions tend to simply replace one elite group with another, a renaissance reintroduces existing ideas into a new context.


A renaissance may inspire revolutions–the French Revolution was a child of the Italian Renaissance, for instance–but the main event is not a moment of change but a deep and broad process of re-visioning.


Where revolutions typically attempt to reform an existing paradigm, a renaissance can transcend the paradigm as people organize and solve problems in completely new ways.

So let’s look at one potential the blockchain offers, and see how far and wide its impact could be. The idea of “universal basic income” is everywhere these days. In the last few months alone, a number of proponents from across the globe and political spectrum have come out in support of the idea.

Tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk are fans. Hawaii has announced an intention to explore the idea. The Scottish government has stated its intention to fund the development of local experiments.

UBI is a progressive idea whose time may be coming, but the devil is in the details. Most of this support is for a UBI based on government fiat currencies like the dollar or the euro.

It is almost exclusively locked into a welfare frame–as a wage subsidy to address layoffs expected from automation, or as a way to reduce government welfare bills–in other words, a different way of dealing with problems within the current economic paradigm.

Existing power structures continue to reign, debt creation still controls the money supply, and the “infinite material growth on a finite planet” logic of extractive capitalism is left untouched.

But what if the UBI was delivered not in dollars or euros, but in a cryptocurrency running on a blockchain? What if this UBI cryptocurrency changed the way money works by being created directly in the hands of the people, so the financial system is built from the ground up, rather than controlled top-down by banks and governments?

It might sound utopian, but it’s really just an idea that exists not too much further along from today’s existing trends. The dominant trend here is between centralization and decentralization.

Industrialized capitalism was an era of centralization: companies grew to vast proportions by exploiting economies of scale and vertical integration (where companies control more and more aspects of their business in-house).

Governments formed increasingly large blocs: NATO, USSR, EU.The new economic age of the internet and the blockchain is shaping up to be one of decentralization. As the geopolitical landscape continues to shift from American hegemony to a multipolar world, a raft of inherently decentralizing technologies are coming online.

Harvesting solar power is becoming cheaper than burning fossil fuels, ushering in household-level micro-generation of near-zero marginal cost electricity.

Mass production of consumer goods is being decentralized by 3D printing: cameras, musical instruments, glassware, houses, cars. There’s even a 3D printer that can make all the parts for another 3D printer.



[Photo: liuzishan/iStock]

But the blockchain is the technology that has the potential to bring all these other developments together to usher in a new age of collaborative social organization and post-capitalist economic logic.

Blockchains are not owned by any one authority, so the applications built on top of them will need to be governed by their users. The applications that make the most sense in this context are neutral platforms facilitating peer-to-peer exchange, without the coercive social contracts of governments nor rent-collecting middlemen in the form of gigantic tech firms.

The implications for the foundational logic of our economic systems are quite thrilling: cryptocurrencies represent nothing less than an opportunity to redesign money. This is critically important because fiat money systems have one design flaw that could ultimately prove fatal.

Just about every dollar, yen, or euro in existence is created by commercial banks with accompanying debt that must be returned with interest. It is rented out to the population temporarily, until it is destroyed when people pay back their debts with interest.

This system leads to both local and international wealth inequality, but it has remained in place for centuries because it honors capitalism’s prime directive: prioritize the production of more capital above all other things.

Unfortunately, it is also a driver of climate change and ecological collapse, since the endless reproduction of capital as we do it now inevitably causes depletion of natural resources (we are now overshooting the earth’s capacity for renewal by a catastrophic 64% annually).



[Photo: liuzishan/iStock]

With such a negative system seemingly locked into place as the planet careens towards one disaster after another, there has never been a better opportunity to create a new system of money based on universal basic income.

And since these currencies can be designed with today’s existential challenges in mind, we can do things like strongly incentivize local trading and disincentivize exploitation of distant workers and ecosystems.

This in turn has the potential to undercut the logic of cheap, mass-production techniques currently at the heart of our throwaway culture.We’re designing and building one example of a “positive currency” in the world of cryptocurrency, called Circles.

In the Circles system, money gets created at the individual level and without corresponding debt. In other words, money starts with the person ‘creating’ it (i.e. it appears for the first time directly in their account). It does not come to us from a central authority like a bank or a government or even an employer.

This means that it is evenly distributed before it enters the marketplace.Instead, money takes on grassroots characteristics. A smart contract creates new currency units at the same fixed rate for each user, and these users create relationships of trust between each other to exchange their newly minted money.

This means that the system doesn’t need to be controlled by any one party, as the value of the currency automatically emerges from the trust relationships that users create. As with any cryptocurrency, bootstrapping an ecosystem that uses this new money system, and grows in ways that keep the specter of inflation in check, will not be easy.

But it is entirely possible. And an important distinction is that Circles is meant to work just fine at local scales, where networks of trust already exist and can easily be transcribed onto the blockchain.

From the user’s point of view, joining the new UBI economy may soon be as easy as downloading an app, connecting with their friends and loved ones, and heading to the nearest shop for lunch.

As exciting as this may sound, the technology for cryptocurrency on the blockchain is not yet fully mature or ready for mainstream adoption. Early cryptocurrencies like...continue reading: https://www.fastcompany.com/40482312/can-basic-income-plus-the-blockchain-build-a-new-economic-syste...

Google and Goldman Sachs are two of the most active corporate investors in blockchain companies, according to a report.

Blockchain is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. But it is also being developed for use in a variety of industries from finance to insurance, promising cheaper and faster processes.

The number of corporate investors in blockchain companies hit a record high of 91 this year, just behind the 95 venture capital firms in the space, according to a report by data firm CB Insights published Tuesday.

So far this year, there have been 42 equity investment deals by corporates, totaling $327 million. This is just behind the $390 million for the whole of 2016.Japanese financial services firm SBI Holdings is the most active corporate investor, having stakes in eight blockchain firms.


These include R3, a consortium of banks working on new applications for blockchain technology, and Kraken, which is an exchange for people to trade cryptocurrency.

Alphabet-owned Google is the second-most active corporate, with investments in bitcoin wallet company Blockchain, and Ripple, a company that is working on money transfers using blockchain technology.

Where does Bitcoin go from here?

Overstock.com is third, while U.S. banks Citi and Goldman Sachs are in fourth and fifth place respectively. Both companies have investments in Digital Asset Holdings, which is run by former JPMorgan Chaseexecutive Blythe Masters.

"Big banks and financial services firms were the first corporate players to make direct blockchain investments en masse — unsurprising, given how Bitcoin's underlying technology lends itself, both technically and in popular thought, to financial services," CB Insights notes in its report.

Large financial institutions are experimenting with ways that blockchain technology could be used, from trade finance, to moving money. Since June 2014, the 10 largest U.S. banks by assets have participated in nine rounds totaling $267 million in disclosed funding to six blockchain companies, the report said.

At the same time, many banks are part of consortia aimed at exploring and developing blockchain technology. Hyperledger, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Ripple and R3 are all consortia working with banks.

ICOs risk 'over-capitalization'

The rising number of blockchain companies and interest in the technology has also brought bigger investment from other sources such as venture capitalists and so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs).


At the current run rate, 2017 is on pace for 188 equity deals worth more than $830 million, up from 138 and $545 million in 2016, CB Insights said.


Mega deals such as the $107 million raised by R3 and the $100 million raised by Coinbase have helped to boost the figure.But ICOs, where start-ups issue new tokens, similar to shares, in exchange for funds, have been growing rapidly.


Total funds raised by ICOs surpassed the total funds raised via traditional equity financing for the first time in the second quarter of 2017, CB Insights said. More than $3 billion has been raised via ICOs, according to Coinschedule, a website that tracks the offerings.



ICO's need to step up their games on transparency  10:13 PM ET Mon, 18 Sept 2017 | 02:56

Some of the biggest ICOs include Filecoin, which raised $257 million, and Tezos, which got over $230 million in funding.But with the ICO craze also comes the risk of "over-capitalization" with teams "receiving too much money too quickly," CB Insights warned.

Blockchain firms 'failing at a higher rate'

The number of companies raising early-stage or seed funding via traditional equity deals, not ICOs, has declined over the past few years.But the risk of these companies failing is much higher than start-ups in other industries.




What is Blockchain?  3:15 PM ET Fri, 2 June 2017 | 04:44

Of 103 blockchain companies that received initial seed or angel funding in 2013 to 2014, only 28 managed to raise further money.


In comparison, of the 1,098 tech companies CB Insights tracked that raised seed rounds in the U.S. between 2008 and 2010, 46 percent raised a second round of funding."Blockchain's consolidation may be tight, with blockchain companies failing at a higher rate than tech startups in other areas," the report said.

Discover more blockchain coverage including video on CNBC here: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/google-goldman-sachs-investors-blockchain.html