WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.

In Santiment’s end-of-year digest, we look back at some of 2021’s most important market trends and what they tell us about the year ahead - all from the prism of on-chain, social and development activity.

When the botnet loses communication to a C2 domain—typically because there is some sort of law enforcement action—the botnet knows to go and scan the entire public Bitcoin blockchain and it looks for transactions between those three Bitcoin addresses,” said Plante. In other words, every time a C2 domain gets taken down, Glupteba can automatically reconstitute via a new domain address sent through the gang’s crypto wallets.
The decentralized nature of the blockchain means that there isn’t really any way to block these messages from going through, or to incapacitate the associated crypto addresses, said Plante.

Estonia has digitized 99 percent of its public services and persistently achieves one of the highest ratings of trust in government in the EU.

Use the 2019 Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising to prioritize your marketing technology investments.

Technology is changing the face of the energy industry. Communities are using blockchain to sell solar power to each other. Big oil and gas companies are using artificial intelligence to map out potential extraction points. Disaster zones and emerging markets are moving directly to microgrids and away from centralized grid models.

In this briefing, we cover:

• Major corporates that are backing blockchain technology to improve energy transactions, like Siemens, which has partnered with LO3 to launch the Brooklyn Microgrid
• The implications of startups like Bidgley that are helping utilities disaggregate the massive deluge of data that has come from a new wave of connected devices
• The role that artificial intelligence can play in the industry, from making grids smarter and more responsive to improving storage efficiency
• What a sturdy cybersecurity offering might look like in the energy industry

The technologies on the list, which is curated by members of the Forum’s Expert Network, are selected against a number of criteria. In addition to promising major benefits to societies and economies, they must also be disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to have achieved considerable scale within five years.

This report presents LibraBFT, a robust and efficient state machine replication system designed for the Libra Blockchain. LibraBFT is based on HotStuff, a recent protocol that leverages several decades of scientific advances in Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) and achieves the strong scalability and security properties required by internet settings. LibraBFT further refines the HotStuff protocol to introduce explicit liveness mechanisms and provides a concrete latency analysis. To drive the integration with the Libra Blockchain, this document provides specifications extracted from a fully-functional simulator. These specifications include state replication interfaces and a communication framework for data transfer and state synchronization among participants. Finally, this report provides a formal safety proof that induces criteria to detect misbehavior of BFT nodes, coupled with a simple reward and punishment mechanism.

We present Move, a safe and flexible programming language for the Libra Blockchain. Move is an executable bytecode language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic: a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations. These safety guarantees are enforced statically by Move’s type system. Despite these special protections, resources are ordinary program values — they can be stored in data structures, passed as arguments to procedures, and so on. First-class resources are a very general concept that programmers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct business logic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies. The safety and expressivity of Move have enabled us to implement significant parts of the Libra protocol in Move, including Libra coin, transaction processing, and validator management.

The Libra Blockchain is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support a low-volatility cryptocurrency that will have the ability to serve as an efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world. We present a proposal for the Libra protocol, which implements the Libra Blockchain and aims to create a financial infrastructure that can foster innovation, lower barriers to entry, and improve access to financial services. To validate the design of the Libra protocol, we have built an open-source prototype implementation — Libra Core — in anticipation of a global collaborative effort to advance this new ecosystem.

To get a deeper understanding of the lifecycle of a Libra transaction, we will follow a transaction on its journey from being submitted to a Libra validator to being committed to the Libra Blockchain. We will then “zoom-in” on each logical component of a validator and take a look at its interactions with other components.

The Libra Blockchain is a cryptographically authenticated distributed database, and it is based on the Libra protocol. This document briefly describes the key concepts of the Libra protocol. For a detailed description of all the elements of the Libra protocol, refer to the Libra Blockchain technical paper

Learn how blockchain helps you feel confident your coffee is fresh and fairly-sourced—even when it's traveled 7,000 miles around the world.

Learn about Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain and cryptocurrency. Discover topics with easy, hand-illustrated guides. Explore what blockchain technology is about. Get everything you need to know about digital assets!

An overview of influencer that inspire me daily when reading the newest trends on digital transformation. Feel free to add your favorite influencer on this list. I personally have no influence on the ranking - a neutral algorithm calculates who has the most impact online. So all fame and blame belongs to the algorithm.

You’re surrounded by disruption and rapid change. Maybe you’re looking for solutions. A way to seize opportunities. We all are. It’s a sprint to stay ahead of technology. Blockchain. Automation. AI. Cybersecurity. It will forever change the way accounting is done. And forever change those who do it. It’s time to reset, redefine and reskill. The way we learn. The way we work. And the way we move forward. Here, you’ll find what you need to not just survive, but adapt and thrive. And disrupt disruption.

If they squinted hard enough, attendees of the International Centre for Parliamentary Studies' annual Electoral Symposium, which took place in late May at the Troia Design Hotel, 90 minutes south of…

The word “trust” is printed on things all around you. The dollar bill in your pocket. The box of Kleenex on your bedside table has a label that reads “trusted care.” In the physical world, it’s easy…

The promise of the internet isn’t that a few centralized powers will do everything for us. That’s the Old World, and we shouldn’t try to recreate it. The promise of an inter-networked world is that we can do more ourselves under new models of collaboration, whether in the fields of science or art or justice.
Imagine if we used our collective data to help us be better neighbors, partners, artists, citizens, and humans, rather than just better products to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Imagine, too, if we could hold technology companies accountable by demanding that they share power more equitably with the people who use and enable their products and services.

A company’s optimal strategic approach to blockchain will fundamentally be defined by the following two market factors, which are those they can least affect:

• market dominance—the ability of a player to influence the key parties of a use case
• standardization and regulatory barriers—the requirement for regulatory approvals or coordination on standards

Companies can determine whether they should invest in blockchain by focusing on specific use cases and their market position.

Blockchain might have the disruptive potential to be the basis of new operating models, but its initial impact will be to drive operational efficiencies. Cost can be taken out of existing processes by removing intermediaries or the administrative effort of record keeping and transaction reconciliation. This can shift the flow of value by capturing lost revenues and creating new revenues for blockchain-service providers.

The economic incentives to capture value opportunities are driving incumbents to harness blockchain rather than be overtaken by it. Therefore, the commercial model that is most likely to succeed in the short term is permissioned rather than public blockchain. Public blockchains, like Bitcoin, have no central authority and are regarded as enablers of total disruptive disintermediation. Permissioned blockchains are hosted on private computing networks, with controlled access and editing rights.