#blockchainid

Agtech startup Agri10x is planning to better connect small-scale farmers to global buyers by using blockchain to cut out the middleman.

As cited in local news source Business Standard, the company announced Tuesday it had entered into a partnership with the Indian government to help remote farmers sell their produce on the market in a bid to generate fairer value.

"Indian farmers have been the unsung heroes of the Indian economy and we wanted to ensure that they get easy access to a global marketplace to sell their produce directly, without any middlemen" CEO of Agri10x Pankajj Ghode said in a statement.

The partnership provides Agri10x access to the government's national common service centres (CSCs), which would enable rural and remote farming communities to register on the company's blockchain platform through what the projects calls village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs).

Under the existing model, farmers engage with middlemen to sell their produce, who then find an appropriate buyer for the farmer in a particular market. Agri10x hopes its business model will help smaller farmers connect to more buyers without the need to squeeze profit margins from engaging in the middleman process.

Verizon said that blockhain’s distributed database is more secure than centralized alternatives because there is no central point of failure or single point of entry.

According to a new report published by Verizon, financially motivated cyberattacks are on the up.

“Now, more than ever, organizations need to be thinking differently about security, and leveraging cutting edge technology to help mitigate against cybercrime. These Verizon solutions offer a significant step forward in cybersecurity protection,” said Alex Schlager, executive director and chief product officer of security services at Verizon Business, in a statement.

This week’s announcement of blockchain products builds on previous research. In September, Verizon was awarded a patent for a blockchain-based system for virtual SIM cards. The idea is similar to the VID system: the system associates a virtual SIM card with a particular user. The system would activate the virtual SIM card, providing the user with access to its mobile network.

Walmart is anxious about the safety of its food following bacterial outbreaks for lettuce and other food, and it's hoping technology will set shoppers' minds at ease. It's telling its leafy green suppliers to use a blockchain system (designed with IBM's help) to track the shipments of their produce. The secure, distributed ledger will help trace the vegetables' path from the farm to the store, revealing the source of any potential outbreak in seconds instead of days. This isn't just for Walmart's internal benefit, either. Eventually, you could scan a bag and use the blockchain to find out where your spinach came from.

In theory, it will soon be possible to store our personal data on the blockchain, using biometrics to grant access only to those who ask for permission to see it. This could mean a day will come when we no longer need to rely on credit agencies like Equifax to collect and store troves of our personal information. More ambitious visions of identity—backed by the likes of Accenture and Microsoft—envision using blockchain as a way to help refugees and the world’s poor obtain citizenship and immigration records. Best of all, the security features of blockchain could mean hacking and identity theft will become much harder.

One of my projects for the 2015 Chaos Communication Camp has been chainbook.bit A decentralized address book, or let’s call it social network, using the namecoin blockchain and remotestorage.

The goal was to build an address book application that stores absolutely no user data and loads the contact information from a decentralized source managed by the contact itself.

Components:

* Namecoin is a decentralized open source information registration system. It is the first and imho the most interesting fork of Bitcoin. It is basically a key-value store and uses the bitcoin blockchain technology to make sure that each key can only be used once and updated only by the rightful owner - without any central authority! One of the most discussed use cases is a decentralized domain registration system.  

Another use case is the storage of identity information - the blockchainID. It describes a standard schema for identity/profile information stored as JSON in the blockchain.  chainbook.bit uses this information and renders a nice website. 

* Remotestorage is a great solution for web applications to allow the user to store application data independently from the application. The user can choose the storage provider or even run his own storage provider. The user owns his the data - not the application. chainbook.bit uses remotestorage to store the user’s contact connections. 

So, everybody manages their own profiles in namecoin and user specific connections are stored in remotestorage. No data is stored in the app, the contact has full control of the profile information which is securely stored in the namecoin blockchain. 

With these two great tools at hand we only need a simple single page HTML/JavaScript app that connects the two and the decentralized address book is done. The JS app has no dependencies and runs completely in the browser.

Have a look at the source code and the README on GitHub and try the app here deployed on 5apps and under chainbook.bit. - this is my profile u/bumi. 

The implementation currently is pretty rough (I used it to teach me some react.js) and the design is pretty much not existent (want to help out with that?) - but I hope you get the idea. 

architecture sketch: