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SUCCESS STORY: Dr. Udoh

October 19, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

“The curated certification programs including Certified Bitcoin Expert certification, Certified Ethereum Expert certification etc. have helped me in understanding the fundamentals of Blockchains. The acquired training enabled me to start a new business” says Dr. Emmanuel Udoh, who successfully completed his certification courses from Blockchain Council.

Dr. Udoh works as a professor at University of Cumberlands, Williamsburg, US. He is a seasoned academician with 21 years of teaching experience in computer science and information technology. Not only has he served as an educator in the fields of computer technologies, he has also worked in the Geology and Earth Sciences domain. 

Dr. Udoh

The expanse of his knowledge and experience is impressive, he is currently researching database, cloud, bitcoin, Blockchain technology and high performance cryptocurrency, specifically smart contracts and DApps. His research interests took him to enroll with Blockchain Council for choosing the best of certification programs available in various Blockchain domains. 

Since he is actively involved in researching cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology, he made a methodical choice in enrolling for a total of 13 certifications. From Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Expert certifications, to Ethereum Expert certification, he successfully completed the Blockchain Specialization Certification programs with the team of experts at Blockchain Council.

When asked about his takeaways from the online training, he stated that the certifications provided focused understanding of the emerging technology. He also mentioned how the detailed modules of the training in Blockchain technology helped him in overcoming the challenges of starting a new business.

Dr. Udoh is also the author of nine books and numerous peer-reviewed articles in IT. He now plans to move forward with his acquired knowledge through the certification training along with his current research, and soon establish a new business.

In his words, “the certifications eased the challenges of starting a new business and the gained skills from the Blockchain Council certifications has given confidence to go ahead with a new business.”

SUCCESS STORY: Dr. Udoh

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Filed Under: blockchain technology Tagged With: articles, author, Bitcoin, blockchain, blockchain council, blockchains, Books, Business, cloud, computer science, cryptocurrency, domains, ethereum, Go, information, Information technology, science, smart contracts, Success Stories, Technology, us

Chinese state-endorsed public chain to act as a global DeFi bridge, says Conflux CEO

September 24, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

Conflux Network, a permissionless blockchain project which is endorsed by the Chinese state, told Cointelegraph on Sept. 22 that the project has officially launched its Tree Graph Research Institute with the Shanghai government. 

According to Fan Long, CEO of Conflux, the Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute will experiment with local states to build a regulatory compliance platform that can bridge global DeFi applications and government regulations. He added that: 

“DeFi is a new world and while it appears as though it may pose a challenge for regulators, they appear willing to listen. At this stage, the most important thing is to maintain a reliable communication channel between two sides— the DeFi innovators and the regulators.” 

When it comes to new techniques and innovations, the Chinese government has shown signs of tolerance for experimentation in the past. Fan indicated that the complexity surrounding DeFi and other relevant distributed innovations will make open communication crucial for continued legislative acceptance. He stated that: 

“Regulators need a reliable way to learn what the new technique is about and where it might lead us to. Innovators need a way to understand the concerns and red lines of regulators.” 

At the moment, Conflux is working with the Shanghai government on several sandbox projects. Fan told Cointelegraph that these projects include integrating blockchain borrowing and lending services into Shanghai’s Pudong Development Bank, and leveraging the Shanghai free trade zone’s unique regulatory framework to devise a unique stablecoin for the region, The CEO explained: 

“Shanghai Free Trade Zone is outside of capital control of China where RMB is offshore with its own set of rules, so we are trying to come up with some regulation breakthroughs with experimenting under the free zone framework.” 

Compared with the central bank’s digital currency, or CBDC,  Fan pointed out that  although a CBDC will allow the central government to maintain control of the financial activities, it would be hard for such a centralized form of digital currency to be accepted outside of China. 

Conflux is trying to either create a free zone stablecoin or build a public permissionless cross chain for the CBDC.

The project, which began its life as a research project at Tsinghua University, has been working to provide a robust and cheap framework for developers to build decentralized finance applications. Fan explained that: 

“Conflux Network seeks to provide a POW network with transaction speeds an order of magnitude faster. The key enabler technique is a novel DAG-based ledger structure together with an optimistic concurrency control to achieve a consistent order of transactions among all the nodes in the network.”

Fan believes that DeFi projects will only be able to go mainstream through willfully enacted compliance measures which evolve alongside government regulations. Blockchain and DeFi are new areas for regulators. Although he cannot speak to how regulators will go about this, his predicts that: 

“Decentralization will make it more difficult for regulators to control DeFi products, but there are still possibilities to exercise controls at the boundary between the decentralized world and the centralized world.” 

The Shanghai Municipal Government, one of the states endorsing the project, is interested in exploring how the city can leverage blockchain techniques to integrate traditional finance with decentralized financial services, says Fan.

In order to connect global DeFi projects and regulations, the company also created the Conflux Open Defi initiative. 

Members include: Sequoia Capital, Blockpower Capital, Antelope Holdings, dForce, DeBank, and MCDEX along with Chinese state support through the Shanghai Science and Technology Committee. Fan says Open DeFi aims to unite Eastern and Western DeFi markets through three globally focused program tracks: risk management, new liquidity strategies, and incubation & innovation.

Chinese state-endorsed public chain to act as a global DeFi bridge, says Conflux CEO

Source

Filed Under: blockchain, blockchain technology Tagged With: Bank, blockchain, CBDC, ceo, China, Compliance, compliant, Currency, decentralized, Decentralized Finance, DeFi, developers, digital currency, finance, financial services, Go, government, innovations, Ledger, Markets, other, Regulation, Risk Management, science, Sequoia, sequoia capital, shanghai, stablecoin, Technology, us, world

Ancient Potheads, a Russian Troll Controversy, and More News

June 13, 2019 by Blockchain Consultants

Researchers have discovered the existence of ancient potheads, an Alphabet-owned company conducted a controversial Russian troll experiment, and local politicians could save us from the crypto-pocalypse. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

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Today's Headlines

Ancient peoples smoked the chronic at funerals

New evidence suggests that 2,500 years ago, ancient people in what is now western China smoked marijuana while playing ritualistic music. Researchers analyzed ancient incense burners from funerals that tested positive for cannabis—and the stuff was relatively high in THC content, by ancient standards. It's a glimpse into how cannabis spread around the world and how humans of all kinds have used it, from ushering loved ones into the afterlife to playing 8 straight hours of Zelda.

A company owned by Google's parent company bought a Russian troll campaign

Jigsaw, a company owned by Google parent Alphabet, paid $250 to run a small-scale disinformation campaign last year in Russia, proving how utterly easy these troll campaigns are to buy. They say it was with the aim of testing disinformation-for-hire services—their target was a political website they created themselves—but critics are not pleased the company actually carried one out.

Cocktail Conversation

Bitcoin has a problem: Mining it requires a massive amount of energy. The cryptocurrency's estimated CO2 emissions are currently somewhere between the annual emissions of Jordan and Sri Lanka. But whether or not crypto burns down the world may be in the hands of some unlikely heroes: local politicians. Local regulators will be the ones in charge of the power market, and could force miners to use greener energy sources, like hydropower.

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Inside the Lab That’s Making Sure Your Weed Is Safe

As cannabis use goes recreational in California, producers are facing a reckoning: They’ll either have to clean up their act, or get out of the legal market.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/ancient-cannabis-weed-alphabet-russian-troll/

Filed Under: cryptocurrency Tagged With: cannabis, health, science, Tech in Two, trolls

Scientists Save a Sick Teen, Hackers Steal $40 Million, and More News

May 9, 2019 by Blockchain Consultants

Viruses from a freezer saved a dying teen, hackers stole millions, and Adam Savage has some organization tips for you. Here's what you should know, in two minutes or less.

Today's Headlines

Genetically tweaked viruses just saved a sick teen

A teenage girl in London found herself in life-threatening peril from cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition where the lungs can’t clear mucus or disease-causing bacteria. She had already had double lung transplants and was running out of options. So her doctors turned to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, where the world's largest collection of bacteriophages—viruses that prey solely on bacteria—was stored in freezers. Scientists identified phages that could attack the bacteria assaulting the patient, and now she is slowly recovering. The news is remarkable for many reasons, but largely because this marks the first use of engineered phages in a human patient.

Hackers stole $40 million from a crypto exchange

A group of hackers were able to steal $40 million in bitcoin—along with lots of two-factor authentication codes meant to protect you from hacking—from a cryptocurrency exchange called Binance. While cryptocurrency hacks have run rampant in 2019 (more than $350 million has been stolen thus far), it’s much less common to see an established exchange like Binance get hacked and leak out so much extra information along the way.

Cocktail Conversation

Former Mythbusters host Adam Savage has some ideas on lists and checkboxes, and how they can change your life (Hint: He adds completed tasks to his lists just to experience the joy of checking them off.) Whether you're already organized, or wishing you were, these tips might help.

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Filed Under: cryptocurrency Tagged With: Apple News Paid Exclude, cybersecurity hacking, health, science, Tech in Two

Colorado Tried a New Way to Vote: Make People PayQuadratically

April 18, 2019 by Blockchain Consultants

The Democratic caucus of the Colorado State House of Representatives had a problem—but it was the good kind. The 2016 election put Democrats in charge of the House, the State Senate, and the governorship. Now it was time to decide, out of somewhere between 60 and 100 appropriations bills, which policies to fund first. But … well, you know how Democrats are, right? The only thing they really agree on is that the most efficient shape for a firing squad is a circle.

The state reps could have just voted, of course, but each of those 41 Democrats in the House was probably the sponsor of at least one of those bills. So they’d vote out of self-interest. No help there. What the Dems needed was a way to capture desire, to know which bills were everyone’s priority. “We have a limited pot of money to spend on new legislation every year,” says Chris Hansen, a state representative from Denver and chair of the House Appropriations Committee. “So we needed to devise a method for accurately capturing the preference of those caucus members.” Hansen isn’t just a pol. He’s a PhD energy economist with an interest in game theory. He’s open to weird science, is the point. So a pal of his, hearing about his plight, told him about a new idea: quadratic voting.

The result of some concept work by a Microsoft Research economist named Glen Weyl, quadratic voting is designed to force people to express their honest opinions about their choices by attaching a cost. One vote costs one unit of value—in its purest form, you would literally buy that vote with your own hard-earned American dollars. But not so fast, because the cost of a vote increases—by the number of votes times itself, to be precise. (That's the "quadratic" part.)1 So two votes cost four dollars; three votes cost nine. Ten votes? One hundred dollars. The point is, you can yell as loudly as you want, but louder yelling costs more—so you have to be really incentivized to do it.

“Fundamentally, quadratic voting addresses the problem of the tyranny of the majority, a standard criticism of democracy,” Weyl says. “Standard rules are based on the notion that everybody is exactly the same and cares the same amount. If you doubt that’s a problem, think about the plight of African Americans in the United States, or the drug war, which dramatically affects certain groups of people.” But with quadratic voting, you can vote harder on what’s closer to home. And when the vote is over, all the money in the pot gets distributed to each voter equally, which is supposed to sort of re-grade the playing field for next time.

Like a lot of other similarly intricate ideas, quadratic voting sets out to solve a fundamental problem in the field of “social choice,” which is to say, how groups of people choose what they want. It may seem like the purest solution is one-person-one-vote, sometimes delightfully abbreviated as “1p1v.” But it doesn’t work as well as it should. Like, a “plurality election” is where the candidate with the most votes wins, but when you have multiple candidates, it’s possible for someone to get a small number of votes but still win if his or her total was higher than the next candidate down. (That happens in a crowded presidential primary.) The American Electoral College system allocates points on a state-by-state, winner take all basis, which means someone can lose the 1p1v “popular” vote by quite a lot and still win. (Hello, Mr. President.) And in the US, slightly more than half of voters, or half of congress, can enforce their will over the other less-than-half—even if the numbers are really close or the will is really disproportionate.

Plenty of other options exist. In a “Borda Count,” named after the French scientist Jean-Charles de Borda, people put candidates in order of preference. There’s an approach called “antiplurality,” where everyone chooses their least favorite candidate, and whoever gets the fewest votes wins. And what you’d like in any multi-choice election is for the “Condorcet winner” to also be the actual winner—which is to say, the thing that would beat all other things in head-to-head races should also win the overall race. So for example, all other concerns aside, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump beat a lot of other people. Then Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. But would Clinton have lost to Jeb Bush? Would Bernie Sanders have lost to Trump?

What? Too soon?

In any case, this is all hard to fix in practice. Maybe even—as the 1950s economist Kenneth Arrow proposed—impossible. In fact, he won a Nobel Prize for his perhaps-too-on-the-nosedly named Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which says … eh, you can probably guess. Arrow came up with a bunch of criteria for an election that let everyone express their personal truth but didn’t let weird counting methods screw a choice unfairly, and showed with math that no method would allow it to happen. Democracy! So bad, right?

So people have suggested approaches to make democracy less impossible. Cities in the California Bay Area frequently use approval voting. It can lead to its own kind of confusion while counts get redone as candidates get knocked out of the running, as happened last year in San Francisco. But it fulfills Arrow’s criteria and isn’t impossible, so a lot of professional societies use it to elect their leadership.

Hansen and the Colorado Democrats had tried to solve these kinds of problems before. Last year they arbitrarily assigned everyone 15 tokens to put on their 15 favorite bills. This might work for priorities at a company retreat, but for budgeting, it “didn’t give us as good a signal,” Hansen says. So after talking to Weyl and working with software developers he knew, the caucus put together a computer interface to serve a modified version of quadratic voting. No dollars here. The members weren’t using their own money—each of them got 100 virtual tokens to buy votes. And unlike Weyl’s original version, the tokens didn’t get redistributed to all the voters at the end.

So in mid-April, the representatives voted. Sure, each one could have put ten tokens on their pet project. But consider the or: Nine votes on one (cost: 81 tokens) but then three votes on another (cost: nine tokens). Or five votes each (25 tokens) on four different bills!

In Colorado at least, it worked, kind of. “There was a pretty clear signal on which items, which bills, were the most important for the caucus to fund,” Hansen says. The winner was Senate Bill 85, the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, with 60 votes. “And then there’s kind of a long tail,” Hansen says. “The difference was much more clear with quadratic voting.” This use case is somewhat unusual, of course. The bills still have to get past the Senate and get signed by the Governor—not impossible, with all Democrats in charge.

As a test case, the appropriations vote at least advances the hypothesis that quadratic voting (or some other equally tricksy system) could improve the American Experiment. Maybe the nation’s seemingly intractable political divisions aren’t a product of Russians, racism, and algorithms but a system that doesn’t let everyone speak with an authentic voice. “Many of these methods have advantages, and most of the experts agree that those other methods are preferable,” says Dan Ullman, a mathematician who teaches a mathematics and policy class at George Washington University and, to be clear, thinks the Electoral College is pretty dumb. Quadratic voting, though? “I’m not so persuaded,” Ullman says. “It’s very different from one person, one vote, and cost-free voting is very American, in my opinion. It seems like people value the right to vote as something that is intrinsic, that it doesn’t cost anything and you’re allowed to express yourself as loudly as you want.”

To be even clearer, in reality you probably don’t want people to be able to buy influence. Quadratic voting would potentially be a real friend to, for example, the not-in-my-backyard side of density fights, where a minority that cares deeply about a vacant lot might be actively jeopardizing the welfare of the majority. And these problems get even worse in a system corrupted by pricey lobbyists and dark-money campaign contributions. Some people already pay for a louder voice. Weyl acknowledges this; he says the first approximate uses of quadratic votes should probably use an artificial currency like the Colorado tokens—at least until all of us are on the same level of Universal Basic Income and have the same starting-point bank account. (This might be why some blockchain advocates have embraced the idea.) “The truth is, no one actually lives in ‘one person, one vote.’ It’s like an imaginary thing,” Weyl says. Things like municipalities, electoral colleges, and bicameral legislatures are really just improvisatory compromises. “So we think, oh, the problem is we don’t have enough democracy. But if you can actually solve it with a general-purpose solution, you don’t need all these kludgy things that solve it really poorly.” Fixing democracy sounds difficult—but not impossible.

1 Updated 4/16/19 10:30 AM PDT Fixed the explanation of the math.


Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/colorado-quadratic-voting-experiment/

Filed Under: blockchain Tagged With: Elections, politics, science

Why You Can’t Trust More Cryptocurrency White Papers

July 23, 2018 by Blockchain Consultants

In 2008, a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto uploaded a PDF to the internet outlining a digital framework for spending money without centralized banks. He sent the paper to a cryptography mailing list, and thus bitcoin—and the blockchain—were born. Ten years later, an entire cryptocurrency industry valued at $300 billion has bloomed from those nine pages.

To many in the cryptography world, this was unexpected. “When we heard about bitcoin for the first time, many of us cryptographers—myself included—did not think it was going to work,” says computer scientist Alejandro Hevia of the University of Chile. Nakamoto didn’t include detailed analysis on the bitcoin architecture, as is customary in peer-reviewed computer science papers. And he hadn’t publicized his ideas via the customary channels: not at crypto conferences or on arXiv, the loosely-moderated site where computer scientists upload their newest ideas in advance of peer review.

“It set the stage for people afterward—that it’s OK to write stuff on your own, put it on your website, and let the world see it,” says computer scientist Emin Gün Sirer of Cornell University. Some 1,600 cryptocurrencies exist today, each of their releases accompanied by a paper explaining the need for its existence. Their inventors write these so-called white papers to communicate how their cryptocurrency is better than the last—and to attract investors.

But without formal vetting, it’s rare for a white paper to achieve Nakamoto-level quality. Some papers are outright scams, veiled in pseudo-technical language that might not even be logically sound. “Maybe they’ll call the person they have beers with to read it on a Saturday, and they call that peer review,” says Sirer. “These papers would not pass scrutiny by any sort of scientist.”

In a widely publicized example this year, the platform Tron, currently the eleventh largest cryptocurrency, released a white paper that seemed to plagiarize two other ones. In some cases, Tron duplicated phrases word for word, without any citations. In response to the accusations, Tron took down the white paper, and its founder wrote on Twitter that the seemingly copied text was due to a translation error. (Tron’s original paper was written in Chinese.)

Tron isn’t the only example. Bad white papers are so plentiful that experts have identified recurring red flags, like when a white paper doesn’t cite any prior work. It’s impossible that your brilliant new idea didn’t build on any existing concepts, says Chris Wilmer of the University of Pittsburgh, who edits Ledger, an academic journal dedicated to blockchain developments.

“The problem is that people are too eager to claim they’ve done something new,” says Hevia. Many of the underlying cryptography concepts in blockchain originated from academic research in the 80’s and 90’s, says computer scientist Arvind Narayanan of Princeton University; even Nakamoto’s white paper had a reference section.

In other words, crypto-developers—ironically, a community devoted to eliminating centralized authority—could use more traditional vetting structures. To that end, in 2014*, Wilmer helped start Ledger, the first blockchain-dedicated academic journal, after canvassing the cryptocurrency community in both industry and academia. “There was resounding enthusiasm for it,” says Wilmer. These days, Ledger receives two to four paper submissions a week, although most don’t pass peer review. “Occasionally we get submissions with no citations,” he says.

Peer review also comes with other safeguards. Reviewers have to funnel their critiques through an editor, so it’s more difficult for people to express opinions without sound logical reasoning. Academic journals also usually require authors to declare potential conflicts of interest.

But peer review isn’t a panacea. It has its own share of problems: Academics are typically slow to accept new ideas, which can potentially kill promising innovations, says Hevia. The process takes months, sometimes years. “It took a long time to have bitcoin analyzed by very good researchers,” he says. “Had Satoshi Nakamoto waited for the analysis before submitting his or her paper, it probably wouldn’t have been published until four years later.” So it’s still useful to have informal places to publish ideas quickly—though places like arXiv and other online academic servers could serve as a middle ground.

The solution won’t be simple. Generally, people should be more transparent about their conflicts of interest, says Wilmer. He also thinks researchers shouldn’t develop and sell ideas at the same time. “When you tell somebody you have this great idea, you already cast suspicion on yourself if you might have financial gain,” he says. Sirer also thinks that investors could benefit from hiring technical consultants—graduate students, maybe, to vet whether the cryptocurrencies are based on sound computer science. For a community that prides itself on cutting out the middlemen—they may need them after all.

*Correction at 10:40 a.m. on 7/18/18: An earlier version of this story misstated the year that Ledger began.


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Filed Under: cryptocurrency Tagged With: Bitcoin, computer science, cryptocurrency, peer review, science

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