#blockchainresources

2020, two Pro-Life, Pro-Guns, and Pro-Trump Conservative Republicans in Congress could now be designated as Pro-Crypto and Pro-Blockchain. Congressman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) has received an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association. Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. (R-AZ) has received a 98% rating on a scorecard analyzing ‘How Conservative are your Congressmen and Senators?” by Heritage Action For America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation.

Last week, Guthrie was the only sponsor of a bill he introduced called the ‘Advancing Blockchain Act,’ part of a group of Republican bills in the House aiming to support technology in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Two months ago, Gosar was the only sponsor of a bill he introduced called the ‘Crypto-Currency Act of 2020’ that includes a comprehensive regulatory framework at the Federal level for cryptocurrency.

IBM is launching a new app that uses blockchain to allow consumers interested in sustainability to trace the coffee they buy along the supply chain.

IBM said its new "Thank My Farmer" app will allow consumers to track their morning joe from the store where they buy it back to the farm where it was grown. Built in collaboration with traceability platform Farm Connect, which also uses IBM's blockchain, the app is expected to launch sometime this year. It was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The app has the support of 10 leading organizations in the coffee industry, including Beyers Koffie and the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC), the largest association of its kind in that country.

The app helps consumers interested in supporting sustainable coffee businesses to make informed choices. In particular, it can be used to promote ethical and environmentally friendly coffee suppliers.

"The aim is humanizing each coffee drinker's relationship with their daily cup," said David Behrends, Farmer Connect founder and president. "Consumers now can play an active role in sustainability governance by supporting coffee farmers in developing nations. Through the blockchain and this consumer app, we're creating a virtuous cycle."

Coffee has a long and complicated supply chain. Once grown it has to be shipped, roasted and packaged before finally ending up on retailers' shelves. With so many participants, supply information can become fragmented, making it extremely difficult for consumers to discover where their coffee originated from with any great accuracy.

The IBM Research project is notable because it suggests that the deterministic requirements of blockchains can be combined with the black box of AI, allowing machine learning algorithms to alter the shape of blockchains to adapt to power or latency limitations, without compromising security.

As such, this would seem to open the door to a whole new design space.

"Why not augment the blockchain with analytics and AI algorithms that can actually shape the blockchain in a way that it helps it to overcome some of the limitations that are out there now?" said Ragnoli.

In the case of IoT, the way this works is the AI receives as an input the IoT devices that are on the system and the available resources of those devices. It also assesses the overall security requirements of the system and decides which and how many devices are mining, the PoW difficulty, the block generation rate, the block size and tries to balance between required security and scalability.

Stepping back, the IBM Research work is part of a broader push to create a future machine-to-machine economy, in which devices would have their own blockchain wallets and trade with each other (picture one self-driving car paying another for the right of way).

But Ragnoli is realistic about the scale of the IoT challenge for blockchains, saying this world is still a "huge set of leaps" away.

Attempting to take on a bite-sized chunk, his team investigated how a machine-to-machine ecosystem might work in an industrial setting, connecting cutting-edge manufacturing activities between a number of factories in the Netherlands. (IBM wouldn't identify the enterprises involved but said there is a consortium on the horizon.)

"Nowadays in industry 4.0, or manufacturing, you have many different factories that collaborate with each other to create a single product," Ragnoli said. "So you have sensors, machines, even algorithms and analytics operating in the different factories, and inside the same factory, that the need to interoperate with each other."

From linking these factory devices together with the hybrid model, IBM found that arranging nodes in clusters of about 250, with 7% of those sub-blockchains doing PoW, achieved the best in terms of scaling, without sacrificing the hard-won security associated with PoW.

"We are taking common consensus algorithms like PoW, the vision of Cosmos, etc., and we are altering ways of putting them together. The way we are designing this is like small Lego blocks, driven by the AI layer," said Ragnol

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-proof-of-work-can-be-made-more-efficient-ibm-research-claims/

Today has seen bullish news for the blockchain space, with South Korea’s Internet and Security Agency (KISA) — a sub-organization of the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT — announcing plans to more than double its budget for public blockchain pilot projects this coming year.

Germany’s joint stock company Deutsche Boerse has also announced the formation of a dedicated unit for blockchain and crypto assets, aiming to harness the technology’s potential to disrupt the capital markets infrastructure.

And in China, the country’s central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBoC), has officially launched the testing phase of a major blockchain trade finance platform ahead of schedule.

Vanywhere is a mainstream product that could have run without blockchain,” Shechter said. “However, the inclusion of blockchain takes the platform to the next level. Through blockchain, we can also build an ecosystem and an economy based on our token. Blockchain has allowed us to remove the dependence on third parties, like credit cards and payment gateways, enabling us to lower our commission and facilitate micropayments.”

The Vanywhere platform covers a wide range of topics and competencies, from fashion styling to understanding cryptocurrencies, local restaurant recommendations to art.

So instead of leaving you to wonder whether that blog post recommending the best restaurants in Lisbon was actually written by a local, Vanywhere lets you speak directly with a resident and has created an economy that rewards the skiller’s knowledge.

How does Vanywhere determine the skill level and suitability of the skiller, and how will it guard against inappropriate behavior?

“To become a skiller, people need to fill out an application which will be reviewed and approved by other members of the Vanywhere community,” Shechter said. “Community members receive guidelines to follow and are rated and rewarded in VANY tokens for approving qualified skillers. As part of the ecosystem, it behooves them to only authorize qualified skillers in order to preserve the quality of the platform that they’re a part of. Should there be any inappropriate behavior or disputes, they can be reported and investigated through our dispute mechanism.”

What’s next for the platform, and what will the initial coin offering (ICO) funds be used for?

“Our token sale in Q1 2018 is the next thing on the horizon,” Shechter said. “Funds raised from the sale will be used to further build our brand. One of the first verticals we’re launching with is cryptocurrency. Throughout the past several months, we’ve received a lot of interest from people in the crypto space [who want] to be skillers, so we will continue developing that vertical and others.”

Though there are many roadblocks to scalability in the current configuration of Blockchain, there are also many world-class software engineers whittling away at the problem on a daily basis. Unlike physical transaction systems, finding the right logic to improve scalability is only a matter of time – just as the large-scale implementation of Bitcoin is only a matter of time. Smart contracts may not be the best solution for your business right now, depending on its size, and that is okay. However, if you have the latitude to implement smart contracts and begin dealing with Bitcoin, you will be far ahead of the curve when the rest of the world inevitably joins in on the virtual currency revolution.