Avoiding Disaster: Researchers Come to Grips With Blockchain's Unknowns
'Catastrophe' may have been the word of choice at a blockchain security conference held at Stanford University yesterday. While cryptocurrencies and private blockchains heighten financial control to a degree, there's plenty that could go wrong with the new systems, and, perhaps spurred by interest from governments and institutions, experts from a range of disciplines are trying to pinpoint those unknowns. The Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering 2017 conference was brimming with examples of how this thinking is taking hold across the ecosystem's disparate sectors. Even....
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An emerging blockchain startup aimed at revolutionizing the way money is donated to charities for people affected by natural disasters has won theD10e contest in Amsterdam with an exclusive invitation to pitch at the D10e in San Francisco in July. Helperbit, a natural disaster management platform, faces real-world problems harnessing the power of blockchain andgeographic information system (GIS) technologies with the aim of helping people affected by catastrophic events around the world. Aiming to unlock untapped potential donations, which are estimated to be between $4 billion and $8....
Various blockchain solutions are being used by organizations and enterprises to create efficiencies for U.S. disaster relief efforts. Natural disasters in the United States are becoming more prevalent, resulting in increasing costs, a lack of transparency between state and government organizations and a slew of other issues impacting relief systems. The Pew Research Center found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) public assistance program spent 23% more on natural disasters between 2010–2019 than it did during 2000–2009. Data from Climate.gov further shows that 2021 was....
In an attempt to better understand the technical, legal and sociological impact of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) a group of researchers is planning to launch a DAO that would seek to "save the whales". Far from an elaborate trolling, the early-stage effort is backed by big universities and researchers seeking to develop a new understanding of how leaderless organizations, powered by a collection of global stakeholders and enabled blockchain technology, could have a real-world impact on wildlife. To date, the effort is being led by researchers at the University of....
Authorities and banking institutions are tightening their grips on people’s wealth all around the globe. Threatening citizens with invasive practices with quite a bit of focus directed at protectionism and anti-laundering maneuvers. Just recently the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron, spoke of monitoring methods to help curb people avoiding taxation. This problem is growing worldwide, and financial institutions are also playing ball with austerity measures. The Al Baraka Bank of Egypt just announced its SAS’ Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solution and launched the platform at all of its....
On May 22, 2010 programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas. Today, this humorous anecdote is an integral part of the Bitcoin lore, but behind the veneer of playful naivety, it masks a more sinister truth. With projects under way in many developing countries to register property and people’s homes on the Blockchain, are we courting a disaster? If a sophisticated programmer is so woefully unaware of the value in such a newfangled digital asset, can we expect that a person new to the idea of Blockchain, and new to the idea of title itself, can hope to do any better?....