The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has just published an early stage study on the potential and affordances of blockchain technologies for the education sector in Europe. The report introduces the fundamental principles of the Blockchain, and explores how the technology may both disrupt institutional norms and empower learners.
Source: European Commission publishes Blockchain in Education Report – Connected Learning
The government-backed banking system provides FDIC guarantees, reversibility of ACH, identity verification, audit standards, and an investigation system when things go wrong. Bitcoin, by design, has none of these things.
Source: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
The Blockchain for Creative Industries cluster comprises staff from the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, as well as from Science and Technology. We explore the disruptive, and enabling potential of blockchain technology for music, photography, art, fashion, film, journalism and gaming. As well as high-quality research outputs, the cluster is committed to teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Areas of interest include new business and economic models; creative entrepreneurship and artistic identity; copyright; visual analytics; and digital forensics. As well as exploring the considerable potential for innovation, we also look at barriers to adoption and possible disadvantages of this new technology – one some have suggested could be as significant as the World Wide Web.
Members of the cluster have been interviewed on behalf of the French Intellectual Property Office, and have taken part in round-table events alongside representatives of the Department of Work & Pensions and the Government Office for Science.
Cluster members have spoken at events organised by Blockchain Storm and the Bitcoin and Blockchain Leadership Forum, and at festivals including the Great Escape and Wilderness. We have also spoken internationally, at events including Distributed: Music in Nashville, USA, and as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week in Bergen, Norway. Cluster members have been interviewed on the BBC and written articles for publications including the Guardian, the Conversation and Distributed magazine.
Our Music on the Blockchain report, published in 2016, received extensive media coverage from publications including Music Week, Music 4.5, International Business Times, Tech City News, Cryptocoin News, City A.M., Fortune magazine, Huffington Post and Record of the Day. The report was launched at Sonos Studios in London, with leading figures in academia and industry.
The cluster is part of the Open Music Initiative, alongside Berklee, MIT, Harvard and UCL.
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White Rabbit begins with the assumption that while they love their pirate sites, a many as 60% of pirates would happily reward creators if it was made easy enough. The startup deals with this by inviting pirates to carry on using the kinds of unauthorized sites and services they’re using already, but with a twist.By installing the White Rabbit browser plug-in, the company will be able to see what content the user is accessing. It will then attempt to match that download to deals it’s made with the companies behind those movies or TV shows. They’ll then get paid a set amount.“White Rabbit is a content ecosystem accessed through a plugin that recognizes the film and series you stream. The streaming sites are P2P or open server, meaning users can choose where they want to stream,” White Rabbit CEO Alan R. Milligan informs TF.“We already have a library of films that have won and been nominated for Oscars, Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festival best film prizes – but will continue adding more films and series as we near launch.”
Source: Blockchain Startup White Rabbit Calls on Pirate Sites to Do Business, Legally – TorrentFreak
I talked to the Dutch business daily Het Financieele Dagblad about blockchain applications in the music business. (In Dutch)
There are many exciting developments coming to market both in terms of improving existing blockchain functionality as well as the consumer’s experience. However, given the rapid pace at which projects are coming to market, I’ve found it to be difficult to keep track of each and every project and where each one fits into the ecosystem. Furthermore, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees without a comprehensive view of what the proverbial forest looks like. As a result, I have compiled a list of all of the decentralized blockchain-based projects that I have been following, was able to dig up through research, along with recommendations from friends in the ecosystem. This market landscape is the output of that work.
Source: Blockchain Project Ecosystem – Josh Nussbaum – Medium
This report zooms in on the potential of blockchain to transform scholarly communication and research in general.By describing important initiatives in this field, it highlights how blockchain can touch many critical aspects of scholarly communication, including transparency, trust, reproducibility and credit. Moreover, blockchain could change the role of publishers in the future, and it could have an important role in research beyond scholarly communication.The report shows that blockchain technology has the potential to solve some of the most prominent issues currently facing scholarly communication, such as those around costs, openness, and universal accessibility to scientific information.
Source: Blockchain for Research
While much has already been written about blockchain applications and prospects in the FinTech industry, little research has been done to explore blockchain technology’s user-centric paradigm in enabling various applications beyond banking. This article is an effort to contribute to that body of scholarship by exploring blockchain technology’s potential applications, and their limits, in areas that intersect with social impact, including human rights. This article explores whether blockchain technology and its core operational principles – such as decentralisation, transparency, equality and accountability – could play a role in limiting undue online surveillance, censorship and human rights abuses that are facilitated by the increasing reliance on a few entities that control access to information online. By doing so, this article aims at initiating a scholarly curiosity to understand what is possible and what is to be concerned about when it comes to the potential impact of blockchain technology on society.
With the continuing collapse in online advertising revenues, websites are turning to other methods to pay their hosting bills – including using visitors’ computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency.It’s a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor’s computers, but it is a potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors’ machines, and at worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, and US video streaming service Showtime, are two sites that were discovered to be sending mining code to users. The former owned up, posting in mid-September that the code was “just a test” and that the experiment was being done with a view to removing all adverts from the site.
Source: Ads don’t work so websites are using your electricity to pay the bills | Technology | The Guardian
Over the past year, we have been working on a set of tools to issue, display, and verify digital credentials using the Bitcoin blockchain and the open badges specification. Today we are releasing version 1 of our code under the MIT open-source license to make it easier for others to start experimenting with similar ideas. In addition to opening up the code, we also want to share some of our thinking behind the design, as well as some of the interesting questions about managing digital reputations that we plan to continue working on.
Source: What we learned from designing an academic certificates system on the blockchain
