State Change

In Brief: Institutional education today suffers from a perverse incentive: The educators define the method by which their own performance is measured. Jarad Pereira explains how his decentralized assessment platform can solve the problem.

Jarad describes a system comprised of assessment in which students are free to acquire skills and knowledge in any way they choose. When they wish to be assessed, they make a request to the Universal Education System which assigns multiple individuals who have been favorably assessed in the relevant skill to assess the student. After assessment is complete, the scores the assessors have given the student are compared. Outliers are penalized - indicating that they are divergent with educated opinion, while those convergent with the mean are rewarded. The student is scored based on the combined opinion of the assessors.

It’s a novel approach that combines economic incentive, game theory and decentralization.

Content: Jarad Pereira, Arthur Falls

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In association with the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and Blockchain for Wall Street conference, ConsenSys hosted a panel discussion with some of the experts who will be attending the event.  

Panelists:

Ron Quaranta, Chairman, Wall Street Blockchain Alliance 

 

Michael Wuehler, INFURA Project Lead, ConsenSys 

Chris Burniske, Blockchain Products Lead, ARK Investment Management

Richard Johnson, Vice President, Market Structure & Technology, Greenwich Associates

We re-examine past predictions and develop a clear picture of the significance of blockchain in the financial industry.

For the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_oZzptDmX8&feature=youtu.be

http://www.wsba.co/

http://www.blockchainforwallstreet.com/

http://consensys.net/

https://twitter.com/ronqman

https://twitter.com/wuehler

https://twitter.com/ARKblockchain

https://twitter.com/_richjohnson

Carolyn Reckhow is responsible for designing and implementing the developing organizational structure of ConsenSys. Balancing employee autonomy with a coherent and unified collective direction is a challenge which Carolyn addresses with a deft hand. Taking inspiration from the distributed information networks that ConsenSys builds services with, and drawing on some of the techniques of Holacracy, Carolyn is developing a system known internally as Meshocracy.

Content: Carolyn Reckhow, Arthur Falls

Subscribe on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/state-change/id1088310627?mt=2

Martin Lundfall, mathematician, poet, and developer on the Co-tricity project, is here today. Co-tricity is a joint venture with German utilities provider, RWE and ConsenSys.

It allows the peer to peer trading of energy, targeting prosumer and small business.

Content: Martin Lundfall, Arthur Falls

Subscribe on iTunes & Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/consensys

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/state-change/id1088310627?mt=2

Michael Wuehler is a developer for the Infura Ethereum/IPFS as a service offering. He is also the founder of the NYC Ethereum Meetup. Today we talk about how the Infura team is mitigating the recent attacks on the Ethereum Network, and Mike's Ethereum journey.

Content: Michael Wuehler, Arthur Falls

https://twitter.com/wuehler

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls

https://infura.io/

http://www.meetup.com/NYC_Ethereum/

This year, ConsenSys has hosted two external projects in its offices: Wu&Y Apparel and the production team of Braid, a psychological thriller based on the award winning script by Mitzi Peirone. The goal has been to bring individuals from industries which might be served by blockchain based tools into the development conversation.

With their projects as pilots, Wu&Y and Braid are helping ConsenSys explore crowdfunding, provenance and accounting use cases.

Content: Mitzi Peirone, Eric Wu, Mike Mantel, Arthur Falls

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-wu-8885609

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-mantell-30810354

http://www.mitzipeirone.com/

http://www.somniaproductions.com/braid/

http://www.wuandy.com/

Troy Murray plans to revolutionize media production by combining the Gnosis prediction market with Nick Dodson's Weifund crowdfunding platform, Boardroom decentralized governance too, a token marketplace, and fiat to crypto payment rail. After receiving SEC approval, The Rudimental is approaching launch.

Content: Troy Murray, Arthur Falls

Subscribe on iTunes

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/state-change/id1088310627?mt=2

The relationship between manufacturers, materials suppliers, and materials producers in modern supply chains is used to obscure the use of slave labor to produce products we use everyday. Blockchain based solutions can be used to bring this information to the consumer.

In March of this year, Rebecca Migirov wrote what would become one of ConsenSys Media’s most popular posts: The Supply Circle: How Blockchain Technology Disintermediates the Supply Chain. In the past, establishing supply chain provenance, or the true origin of products has been extremely difficult. Using verifiable cryptographic ledgers like blockchains, it is trivial to trace the Fillet o’fish to the fisherman who caught her, or map the resources used to produce a cell phone. Spoiler: You may not like what you find.

Content: Rebecca Migirov, Arthur Falls

https://media.consensys.net/

https://media.consensys.net/2016/03/09/the-supply-circle-how-blockchain-technology-disintermediates-the-supply-chain/

https://twitter.com/rmigirov

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls?lang=en

The usability of cryptocurrency has historically been a stumbling block for adoption: The addressing system is alien to many users, payment rails have been weak or non existent, and it’s value has been volatile. The problems are being solved however. Coinbase’ relationship with PayPal and Metamask’s integration of the Coindesk Buy Ether button has brought Ether to anyone with a credit card. Mathematician and financial engineer, Hadrien Charlanes is solving the volatility problem with a collateral based hedging system called Stabl.

Content: Hadrien Charlanes, Arthur Falls

https://twitter.com/HCharlanes

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls

Subscribe on iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/state-change/id1088310627?mt=2

In Brief

Your Internet Service Provider is underperforming and over charging. However, mesh networking combined with the micropayment capabilities state channel technology offers will soon provide a prosumer alternative to the aging, legacy solutions.

Whether you live in Auckland, Oakland, Paris, or Shanghai your internet performance is probably limited by the poor performance of last mile Internet Service Providers. A decentralized solution to this problem called mesh networking has been deployed by a number of communities to provide higher performing and often free internet.

The is one problem however. Paying nodes to relay information is difficult when they may be connected to many other nodes and peers relaying very small amounts of traffic from each. The aggregate of this traffic is large but the individual payments requires are numerous and often so small that transaction costs consume much of the potential revenue. Enter Ethereum State Channels.

Since the beginning of the field of cryptocurrency in 1985 with David Chaum’s canonical white paper Security Without Identification, micro transactions have been a chief value proposition. State channels reduce the cost of a cryptocurrency transaction to purely the cost of sending the data concerned. Using these tools, incentivized mesh networking is now possible.

Jehan Tremback is a developer and friend of ConsenSys building a system using all these technologies. This interview was originally concerned with his state channels work dubbed “Avocado” developed with consulting from rockstar developers Ameen Soleimani and Martin Köppelmann but just as interesting is the Althea mesh network.

Content: Jehan Tremback, Arthur Falls

Be sure to follow the show on iTunes & Soundcloud

https://twitter.com/jtremback

http://altheamesh.com/