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Friday, August 28, 2015
Friday, August 14, 2015
August Update
BlockVerify has decided to attend Boost VC in San Mateo California. We are proud to be part of Tribe 6 and have been using this opportunity to accelerate the development of BlockVerify. We are preparing for demo day in late October.
Our BlockVerify Application is close to beta launch. Our development team has been working hard to get the Android and iOS applications ready for the market. We have been testing transactions and expect it to be ready for private testing by late August. Below are some screenshots our our new app.
Monday, August 10, 2015
ShapeShift.io Pioneers Ethereum on its Digital Asset Exchange
“Ether” now available for instant exchange with Bitcoin and others
SWITZERLAND, August 10, 2015 – ShapeShift.io has integrated the highly-anticipated Ethereum digital asset onto its instant exchange platform. Customers anywhere in the world can now buy or sell “ether” instantly along with Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple and several dozen other digital assets through ShapeShift.io. There is no signup process nor account required to use ShapeShift.
Bitcoin’s success has inspired a number of competing and complementary blockchain-based platforms. The most anticipated among them, Ethereum, which has been in development since 2013, shattered crowdfunding records last year when it raised over $18 million.
“Ethereum is a wild project and will likely change software architecture in the same manner that Bitcoin is changing financial architecture,” explained Erik Voorhees, ShapeShift’s CEO. “The two projects are beautiful compliments to each other.”
The Ethereum platform is designed to enable advanced software development upon a decentralized architecture. Where Bitcoin was designed specifically as money, Ethereum attempts to apply true peer-to-peer principles to scripts and applications themselves. If successful, many future software products will not exist on a central server, but within the Ethereum blockchain, making them censorship-resistant and trustless. Augur, the world’s first decentralized prediction market, is one of the first high-profile projects built upon Ethereum.
By including Ethereum’s digital token on ShapeShift, software developers and users can immediately exchange between “Ether” and assets like Bitcoin or Litecoin, bringing seamless liquidity to the ecosystem.
Note on confirmations taking up to 25 hours (note: I think this isn’t appropriate for press release (too technical), but should be emphasized clearly in the blog post and social media)
“On a personal note, I’m very appreciative of the hard work that the ShapeShift development team has put into making the Ether listing a reality,” said George Hallam, Business & Partnership Director at Ethereum.
Companies and individuals can immediately utilize the ShapeShift website or API to convert between Ether and most other leading digital assets such as Bitcoin, with no account needed.
About ShapeShift.io:
ShapeShift is a crucial piece of infrastructure in the world of Bitcoin. From start to finish, users can exchange digital currencies in seconds, with no account required. No emails or passwords. No lengthy signup process. No accounts. No bid and ask orders. No friction. ShapeShift's goal is to be the fastest, safest, and most convenient way to swap digital assets. See more at: https://shapeshift.io
About Ethereum:
Ethereum is a decentralised platform featuring stateful user-created programs (“contracts”) described by a Turing-complete virtual machine code. Ethereum uses its underlying token (“ether”) to account for computational costs of the execution of Ethereum contracts.
Ethereum is a network for powering decentralised application in need of a secure transaction ledger that can be used to securely execute a wide variety of services including: voting systems, domain name registries, financial exchanges, crowdfunding platforms and many more. Learn more about Ethereum at www.ethereum.org.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
How many economic problems Bitcoin solves and why it could change our lives
(Sole24Ore) What is going to happen in the future if the computer is always becoming smaller? Always less expensive, and always more mobile?
Soon, we’ll need to link these computers together in a way that is different from the past, with less centralization. Here, we explain the birth of distributed systems, that coexist alongside the traditional systems without replacing them.
The inherent problems in verifying access rights to information and their management has hindered the development of distributed networks until the publication of the famous Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Nakamoto solved two economics problems:
- Make digital information (for example, a bitcoin) a “rival good;” and, preventing the owner to spend it a second time
- Achieving said result with a public register (the blockchain), where the access to information is “not-excludible”, because it is available without intermediaries - it is public and permanent.
The consequences of the adoption of the blockchain is twofold: on one hand it will lower transaction costs; on the other hand, it creates a trust network with a group of people who do not know each other. All ensured thanks to the certainty guaranteed by asymmetric encryption.
With the blockchain, we have found a means for automatically certifying our money transfers, in the case of mathematical coins. In terms of property, with the smart contract first described by Nick Szabo, the blockchain can one day enable patent protection, trusted electronic voting remotely, and even more.
Decentralization has an important effect on transactions. Three areas that benefit are as follows:
- Anonymity - if no one knows the identity behind the lists of parties.
- Privacy - in the sense that no one knows what you purchased and at what price.
- Irreversible - which comes with a lack of monitoring and compensation body.
Now we are able to immortalize forever the information (amounts, documents, debts and credits, etc) and transfer them alone, without intermediaries such as notaries and lawyer. The work to certify these transactions are carried out by the “miners.” They are incentivized by receiving for a small fee (and with the prize of new bitcoins) to cover the fixed costs of specialized equipment and the variable costs of consumed energy.
However, not everything can be fully decentralized. The more mining power is distributed and fragmented, the less risk the network runs into. The power, thus decentralized, is inversely related to corruption.
On this issue, the known Bitcoin popularizer Andreas Antonopoulos, in an incredible article, describes the possible totalitarianism that could happen once someone has taken control of the valuable information that people exchange on the way they spend money.
“If there is control, there is power.”
What innovation can be achieved if you have to ask permission to exchange data?
It is decentralization that creates the conditions that can develop a competition in the offer of services conveyed by the network.
We probably can’t imagine what will happen after the mass adoption of this network for the exchange of information. Just like it was not imaginable what Google and Facebook would come to be before the advent of the Internet. Billions of interdependent people and machines give rise to new business; and when are grouped in federations, thanks to the standard, they create new and completely unexpected ecosystems.
The blockchain is, therefore, a public digital good.
In this field, there is new research in the universities; one of those carried out by an Italian scholar at Harvard known as Primavera De Filippi.
Now you can reverse incentives that led to the infamous "tragedy of the commons”. Because the use of policies based on a blockchain makes it possible to design new systems of incentives, which are certainly more transparent, you can therefore achieve a new form of consent for the self-government of public goods.
Power of intangibles: we now have a (info)structure that does not consume with its use and that we build together.
Author: Massimo Chiriatti, technologist and member of Assob.it
Friday, August 7, 2015
by Nicola Minichiello / Twitter@colortwits
Spells of Genesis (SoG) is a mobile game combining aspects of Trading Card games with Arcade games, and is being developed to have Bitcoin and blockchain technology as an integral part of its in-game economy and storyline.
EverdreamSoft (EDS) is the Swiss-based game maker behind the project as well as its first title Moonga, which has over 250,000 downloads to date. EDS is not new to Blockchain technology, Moonga has been integrated into the blockchain with Counterparty assets representing trading cards.
SoG has been in the making for a while now and a functioning Beta, available on iOS and Android, is expected by the end of the year. The games launch is dependent on a BitCrystals (BCY) Token Sale, which will allow the company to raise the funds needed to complete the game and bring it to life. Originally the sale was supposed to happen on Koinify but they discontinued their service on May 29, moving on to explore new opportunities. “Koinify will be retiring its current dApp software sale platform and projects,” stated Tom Ding at the time.
The token sale will now be hosted by EDS in partnership with ShapeShift, Brave New Coin reached out to both teams to find out more.
“By popular demand from the community, we understood how important it was for our supporters that we accept multiple cryptocurrencies during the Token Sale. In order to allow this, we have decided to partner with ShapeShift which offers over 40 different altcoins.”
- Shaban Shaame EverdreamSoft CEO and Founder
Shaame explained that the tokens will be offered at a rate of 15,000 BCY per bitcoin. The price will increase every 5 days, a process that has been used in previous token sales for Ethereum, GetGems and Factom. The sale will automatically end when all the BCY are sold or after a 30-day period. 70 million BCY will be available for sale, if any are unsold they will be burned. The burn involves sending BCY to a provably unspendable address, effectively destroying any unsold tokens.
The BitCrystals token sale will be milestone-based, where the funds raised are held in a multisig wallet by third parties. EDS will only get a percentage of the funds if and when development of the game has reached pre-determined stages. There are four milestones in total, the last of which has an estimated completion date of April 2016.
SoG has gained a supportive crowd thanks to the release of several Blockchain-based trading cards dedicated to some of the top crypto projects. Their marketing strategy, aimed at the bitcoin community, seems to have paid off even before the actual game launch, an indication of the attention the game may attract.
Using the blockchain allows for a mathematically provable, publicly-verifiable proof of rarity that simply wasn’t possible before Bitcoin. This should help guarantee the authenticity of cards and games assets within the SoG ecosystem.
“By putting digital game assets directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, Spells of Genesis has initiated a new megatrend. Everyone will be doing this soon.”
- Erik Voorhees, CEO ShapeShift.io
There seems to be a frenzy around buying some of the limited edition cards. The SATOSHICARD is limited to 200 units and only available via flash sales, while the FDCARD is limited to 300 units and was only made available to Folders. The latter is now sold out.
BitCrystals will be used to purchase new card decks and game items, while working as the medium of exchange within the game, and a tradable asset outside of the game. The fact that BitCrystals are a Counterparty asset makes them suitable to be traded by anyone, even if they are not a SoG player.
“Spells of Genesis is breaking new ground with their model of creating scarce digital game assets on the blockchain. We've been excited about this since we learned of it, and it has guided some of our own internal product development. Our support for the crowdsale is partly because we want to see Spells of Genesis succeed, and partly because it helps us test our exchange capabilities in a new way.”
- Voorhees
Shaame elaborated, explaining that EDS wants to take full advantage of a shared economy that only the blockchain allows. “We believe when projects are crowdfunded people who pre-purchased the product should not only get early access or a t-shirt, they should own the fuel of the game economy.”
“Once the game is funded and up and running all the game assets we’ll have for sale will be acquired only with BCY. All our contributors will have a shared ownership of the overall game value by holding BCY, the key to acquire game assets.”
- Shaame
Not only will contributors have a stake in the games value, every time a new card deck is purchased the BCY used will be burned, reducing the total number in circulation. According to the team, this could increase the value of each BCY as more and more assets are purchased and BCY burned.
To drive asset sales the game needs users. Shaame expects the game to quickly achieve 50,000 Monthly Active Users, in the first few months. “Usually the conversion between a free player and a paying one in the game industry is about 5% to 9%.”
Figures from the companys first game, Moonga, show that the Monthly Average Revenue Per Paying User is around 40 USD. If Shaame can attain the lower bound of the industry conversion rate, and his user target of 50,000, the initial estimate for BitCrystals used for in-game items should be around $100,000 USD per month.
“In the long term we aim to become the leading Trading Card/RPG game and reach Puzzle and Dragon which generates around 40 million USD in sales per Month.”
- Shaame
Spells of Genesis is at an early alpha stage at the moment, it is available for a test run at http://www.jasperdamman.nl.
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