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What are some ways blockchain smart contracts can improve government?originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.


Answer by Samantha Radocchia, Co-Founder at Chronicled, on Quora:


Some governments are more transparent than others. That’s not a surprise to anyone who keeps up with global news. But blockchain technology could change the way many governments operate, mostly through an increase in both efficiency and data transparency.



If a government chooses to use blockchain for contract management, identity management, and its many other uses, it creates a publicly available record of those actions. So we could soon be seeing the beginning of a new, radical transparency in government. Or not.

How Transparent Is Too Transparent?


Total data transparency would be an exciting new era of governance. But we might see some pushback before we get there, if we ever do. The reason is that most governments may be a little worried about this type of transparency.


It could be for security reasons, or it could be that they just want to keep their edge over rival countries. Knowledge is power, right?


And those worries aren’t just limited to governments, by the way. I’ve spent the three years working to ensure authenticity in supply chains by using blockchain and smart contracts.


What I have found is that some entities already know they have a problem with counterfeit goods, unethical supply chains, conflict materials, but they don’t necessarily want that information public. Which makes sense from their perspective. If you have a serious problem, you might tell a few friends who can help, not the entire neighborhood.


On The Road To Transparency


Whatever your thoughts on social media, you have to admit that it has done an incredible job of getting people to air what used to be personal information online. At this point, most of us are already pretty comfortable relinquishing our privacy to businesses and the government. We hardly think twice when clicking on those buttons that say


“Agree” or “I Accept the Terms.”The question is, will this go both ways? Will governments and corporations be willing to become more transparent in exchange for the benefits that blockchain provides?


Because there are plenty of benefits.


Smart Contracts And Efficient Government


Governments around the world are in a great spot to utilize blockchain technology. One of the biggest complaints about government today is about inefficiency. Wasteful. Well, blockchain cuts out inefficiencies and waste from systems.


Government contracts are in high demand for a lot of companies, and blockchain provides a way for governments to quickly and easily determine who has a history of completing contracts on time and on budget.And blockchain can also help cut out middlemen that increase the complexity of citizen services.


If you want to sell your car, you have to exchange the title at the DMV. Buying land, starting a business, or even paying taxes require the use of a governmental middleman that validate the transaction. That third-party verification isn’t necessary on the blockchain. Each party has access to the records of the transaction. Instead of going to the DMV to complete the transaction, you could sell your car on an app on your phone.


Regulatory Compliance


Governments also create regulations, especially environmental ones. After all, no one likes improperly disposed of mercury! But officials can’t always ensure regulations are being followed. Blockchain can help here, too.Just this past June, seven Chinese citizens were jailed for falsifying data and tampering with the systems that monitor air quality.


China has huge problems with the quality of its air in many parts of the country. But they’re cracking down—and falsifying monitoring data is now as serious a crime as doing the actual polluting. But what if that information was automatically stored on the blockchain as soon as it was collected, available for everyone to see?


The people who are currently in jail wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to falsify the data. An unchangeable and transparent data trail is exactly what’s needed to make sure that regulations are being followed.Now, those people who falsified the data?


They stuck cotton into the sensors to stop them from picking up the correct amount of pollutants in the air. So blockchain technology can’t stop everyone who’s determined to break the law or flaunt a regulation. But it will stop a lot of them.Is that going to be enough for governments to take the plunge into a more efficient, but more transparent, form of governance?


It may be. Each country will be different, so it’ll be interesting to see who takes those first steps towards greater transparency—and when they take them.


This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:


Discover even more on Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/11/29/how-blockchain-could-eventually-change-the-way-governm...

ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) are one of the hottest topics of the year because it’s an easy way to raise cash and it’s largely unregulated. Even last night at Red Bar + Restaurant, a rooftop bar at the International Finance Center in Hong Kong, I heard chatter of different upcoming ICOs to invest in.


Over $3.5 billion dollars have been raised to date via ICOs. In 2017 alone, $3.2 billion was crowdsourced. Top projects like Filecoin ($206M), Tezos ($232M), EOS ($180M), and Bancor ($154M) are taking the lion’s share of the funding. Raising $1-10M as a small startup just getting off the ground becomes very achievable.




CoinDesk


Over $3.5 billion dollars have been raised to date via ICOsIt was a red hot summer with $462M raised in June, $575M in July, and the peak was reached in September with a whopping $663M of ICO funding.

ICO Cool Down


Coin offerings only started to cool after September 4th, the day the People’s Bank of China placed a ban on ICOs. In fear of upcoming regulations, only $516M was raised in October and so far $486M in November. ICOs are still operating in a legal gray area. However, the industry is moving fast to develop standards for a compliant framework for token sales. Projects like the SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) help navigate U.S. laws.





CoinDesk


The ICO market starts to cool down in fear of upcoming Chinese regulations.In the hot days of ICOs, you could buy tokens at the ICO price and in the first month flip that for a profit. Discounts of 10-20% are frequently given to those who participate early during the token sale period.


Those that are lucky enough to get into the ICO pre-sale may even get a 30-40% discount. When these tokens finally get listed on an exchange, some portion of people who initially invested into the ICO will sell their tokens for a profit.


Flippers flooded the market. Now it’s common to see the token values decrease as they get listed on exchanges. Bancor’s ICO price was $3.86 and dropped as low as $1.38 in their first month of trading. Many projects running ICOs are now enforcing lockup periods based on the size of the discount to maintain a stable token price.




CoinMarketCap.com


Bancor’s ICO price was $3.86 and dropped as low as $1.38 in their first month of trading.


With scams ongoing, the public is generally wary of putting money into an ICO. The SEC has charged two ICOs with fraud. Tezos has been hit with two class action lawsuits. There is a lot of skepticism around projects that are being created now. Do they really need to be on blockchain or are they looking to get rich from ICOs? More than just a white paper is needed.


You have to have a solid team, a solid prototype or users, and some sort of self-governance for investors to be confident in you.


Crypto and blockchain are here to stayHowever, the blockchain and crypto community remain absolutely unfazed by this. Last week, I attended the 2nd annual Blockchain Conference in Hong Kong. Everyone in the industry was more energized than ever about the potential opportunities with blockchain. I had conversation after conversation with entrepreneurs about how disruptive this technology is.


They believed this well before the ICO hype.AI has been absolutely on fire the past few years. But the power of this technology has largely been trapped inside of big companies. The data, the research, the computing power, etc., is all centralized in companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.


This means the latest advancements in this industry are in the hands of mega corporations and they are hoarding it for themselves.


Hello decentralizationAI advancements needs to come out of these big companies and come into the hands of the community.Smart folks like the team at Ocean Protocol are working on this problem. Ocean is a protocol and network that incentivizes users to provide a vast supply of high-quality data. The data is used in training artificial intelligence models.


Separately, there’s the team at Trane.AI working on a decentralized way to tag, store, and model data.I’m one of the co-creators of the Raven Protcol, decentralizing and distributing deep-learning training. The protocol will proliferate the adoption of AI and grow the ecosystem. Companies will achieve over 100X faster training of deep neural networks and will be 50X more cost efficient.


The marriage of AI and blockchain is inevitable and will be celebrated in the days to come. They’re two fundamentally disruptive technologies and we’re doing our bit to expand the horizon.


With or without the hype, ICOs are one funding mechanism to fuel new companies brave enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with the incumbents and challenge them at every step to build a brighter future.


It will leave us with the next wave of disruptive technologies in the way the dot com bust left us with Google, Amazon, and Ebay.

Discover more articles about the blockchain at Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/outofasia/2017/11/27/three-reasons-why-the-ico-market-is-cooling-down-b...

The potential for blockchain technology to bring about widespread change has been predicted since 2011 and the emergence of Bitcoin. But it was this year when the concept really started to capture people’s attention.


Perhaps spurred on by the meteoric rise in price of Bitcoin – the first tangible example of a blockchain technology – hype grew around encrypted, distributed ledgers in the financial sector.


Blockchain-focused financial services startups raised $240 million in venture funding during the first half of the year. However, its potential was beginning to be recognized across other sectors and industries.2018 is likely to see a continuation of this trend of innovation and disruption. Here are the five key ways this is likely to happen.


More use outside of finance
While it’s implications for the financial sector might seem most apparent, any industry or organization in which recording and oversight of transactions is necessary could benefit.


In healthcare, IDC Health Insights predicts that 20% of organizations will have moved beyond pilot projects and will have operationalized blockchain by 2020, so 2018 should see significant progress in that direction. In recruitment and HR, blockchain CVs have been developed which will streamline the selection process by verifying candidates’ qualifications and relevant experience.


Legal work which involves tracking transfer of ownership – for example intellectual property law, or rea estate deeds – will also be made more efficient through implementation of distributed ledgers.


 year we should expect to see inroads by innovators in the legal field making this a reality.Meanwhile in manufacturing and industry, the Blockchain Research Institute, the founders of which include IBM, Pepsi Co and FedEx, say it expects blockchain to become the “second generation” of the digital revolution following the development of the internet.


It has highlighted work by electronics manufacturer Foxconn to use blockchain to track transactions in its supply chain.

Blockchain meets the Internet of Things
Though this sounds like a clash of the buzzwords, serious thinking is going into how these technologies could be made to work together to improve business processes, and day-to-day life.


Security is one reason they are a good fit – blockchain’s encrypted and trustless nature makes it a viable option when it comes to keeping the ever-growing number of connected devices in our homes and offices safe.


Research envisages that blockchain compute power that is used to “mine” Bitcoin could be put to use safeguarding our smart homes from a new generation of cyber-burglars looking to break in and steal our data.


Another proposed use is that the cryptocurrencies built on blockchains would prove ideal for automated micro-transactions made between machines. As well as recording machine activity on the ledger for record-keeping and analytical purposes, machines could effectively “pay” each other when smart machines operated by one organization interact and transact with those owned by others.


This is likely to be further down the road, but it is likely we will see research and breakthroughs in this area in 2018... continue on Forbes to read page 2 of this article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/11/22/5-essential-blockchain-predictions-that-will-def...