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I’m writing a series of posts about blockchain infrastructure, and in particular how it impacts on blockchain and crypto startups. In Part 1, I discussed blockchain size and the key differences between Bitcoin’s blockchain and Ethereum’s. I concluded that blockchain size doesn’t have a significant impact on startups; it’s only relevant to miners and others who…
Read More Blockchain speeds & the scalability debate
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Ever since Ethereum took the blockchain concept that Bitcoin introduced and built an app platform for blockchain, several others have tried to do the same thing. One of the most prominent “Ethereum alternatives” is NEO, an open source Chinese project that hopes to build a “smart economy” using blockchain technology. Like Ethereum, NEO has built…
Read More NEO’s quest to be The One
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My goal with Blocksplain is to track blockchain and cryptocurrency startups, which some are calling “Web 3” companies, and explain how they fit into the emerging blockchain ecosystem. But in order to understand the potential value of these startups, we first need to understand how the ecosystem itself is progressing. That’s my aim in this series…
Read More Does blockchain size matter?
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There are some wild claims going round about how much ICOs raise. Sometimes it’s difficult to verify if a company actually did raise the amount of money they claimed. Fortunately there is a tool available to examine Ethereum blockchain transactions, which is where most ICOs raise their money. It’s called Etherscan and in this post…
Read More How to use Etherscan to verify ICO claimsBeaker is a new, decentralized web browser. Ah, I hear you say, so it’s a Mozilla for blockchain? A Chrome for crypto? Actually, no. That’s because Beaker doesn’t use blockchain. It uses a peer-to-peer network model, similar to BitTorrent. You may ask why I am profiling a non-blockchain app on Blocksplain. Well, I started this…
Read More Beaker’s decentralized browser, sans blockchain
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Bitcoin is just nine years old and the identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still unknown. This week I came across a story of Bitcoin’s origins by someone named “Scronty.” It’s a long but compelling narrative, basically claiming there were three main founders of Bitcoin: Phil Wilson (a.k.a. Scronty, from New Zealand), Craig Wright…
Read More I’m one third of Satoshi Nakamoto, claims kiwi developer
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Combining two hot tech trends in one product is bound to stir up interest, and the ICO of AI + blockchain startup SingularityNET was no exception. Its token, AGI, was sold at ten cents a piece in a token sale at the end of December. The company raised its goal of US$32,800 and the token is…
Read More SingularityNET wants to decentralize AI
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Jarrod Dicker just left his executive job at The Washington Post to become CEO of a blockchain company. Dicker described his new employer, Po.et, as “a shared, open-source universal ledger designed to track ownership, attribution and the marketplace flow” of content. When I checked out the Po.et homepage, I was immediately reminded of Ted Nelson’s…
Read More Po.et picks up where Xanadu left off
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It’s a question many of us have been asking, as we watch new ICOs and cryptocurrencies pop up every day: do they really need a blockchain to do that? Fortunately there’s a white paper, written by academic computer scientists, which answers this question. The paper is written by Karl Wüst and Arthur Gervais, who work…
Read More Do you need a blockchain? Yes, if you’re an Open Web advocate
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Over the weekend Andreas Brekken published a lengthy post denouncing IOTA, which had previously received a lot of hype as a cryptocurrency for Internet of Things (IoT). Brekken, who named his blog Shitcoin, concluded that “IOTA cannot be used for Internet-of-Things devices. Or anything.” Damn. I’ll comment on Brekken’s analysis, but I also want to use this post…
Read More IOTA & the difficulty of testing blockchain apps