The Third Web

In Brief: In spite of the tumultuous public life of it’s founder, the sharing economy project is evolving and moving forward rapidly. We’ve just seen the end of a successful token launch and an all star advisory board informing new leadership fronting a strong dev team. Arcade City is back on the road.

Three members of the post-Chris David team: Bernd Lapp, Michael Thuy, and Stephan Ponnet discuss the status and future roadmap of Arcade City. What was once thought of only as a ride sharing App has been reimagined as a network of services modeled after games, all using the ARC token. 

Content: Bernd Lapp, Michael Thuy, Stephan Ponnet, Arthur Falls

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In Brief: Round 2 of the biggest hackathon in blockchain is nearing it's apex. On the 22nd of December a winner will be announced. Today the man behind the hack.ether.camp virtual accelerator, Roman Mandeleil looks back over the last two months of competition and explains how the platform operates. Then we hear from some of the leading contestants:

Once artchain has been established, the art market can be securitized, which has heretofore been an impossibility. This is the Blockchain Revolution. Together, with the new consensus artchain can provide, we can build a coalition of art industry professionals and participants facing the future of mutual self-regulation of transactions and provenance.

The art industry is rife with undetected fraud. Currently, the art market suffers from incompleteness of information due a lack of trust among its participants.

Establishing the authenticity of art assets is expensive and often disputed which leads to artificially raised costs of conveyancing in an attempt to protect ‒ imperfectly ‒ against fraud.

Project Oaken - Smart Cities/IIot Gateway Prototype by Ethembedded.com

Oaken is a secure, autonomous, machine to machine platform built to provide the underlying infrastructure(hardware & software) needed to power smart cities. This infrastructure is made up of a suite of projects, individually called ACORNS.

The Decentralized Court

The decentralized court would act as an opt-in legal crypto-institution.

Parties would select the court to arbitrate their contracts in case of disputes.

Dispute will be first handled by arbitrators, but parties will have the possibility to appeal to a jury system. Both arbitrators and jury members will have game theoretical incentive to arbitrate disputes in an honest manner.

Content: Roman Mandeleil, Worthy Contestants, Arthur Falls

https://hack.ether.camp/scoreboard

iTunes:

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In Brief: Tezos is a blockchain based smart contract platform that incorporates protocol level governance, modular design, and a functional scripting language. Pretty much the shopping list of features the Ethereum community is looking for.

Yes, Yes, I know this is supposed to be a show about Ethereum, but examining emerging platforms is the best way to understand what the people with the deepest understanding would like to see changed in the protocol.

Tezos is modular, designed to enable drop in replacement of most components without hard fork, it has a built in governance mechanism, and it uses a functional scripting language. These three elements are emerging as the most desirable traits missing from the Ethereum protocol. With EIP#86/EIP#96 Ethereum will move closer to what Tezos aspires to be. For now though these younger, more nimble upstarts can help show is what is possible with blockchain based smart contract platforms.

Content: Kathleen Breitman, Arthur Falls

https://twitter.com/breitwoman

https://tezos.com/

https://medium.com/the-ether-review

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

In today's episode we compare two books by William Mougayar: Opening Digital Markets (1997), and The Business Blockchain(2016). We also discuss the Steemfest conference which took place in Amsterdam last month.

William Mougayar is an entrepreneur, venture advisor and angel investor, who previously held senior positions at Hewlett-Packard and Cognizant. He is the founder of Startup Management (http://startupmanagement.org/) where he blogs and curates on start-ups and the cryptocurrency economy.

http://steemfest.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Opening-Digital-Markets-Strategies-CommerceNet/dp/0070435421/

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Blockchain-Practice-Application-Technology/dp/1119300312/

https://twitter.com/wmougayar

Content: William Mougayar, Arthur Falls

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In Brief: Melon is a protocol and asset management software suite for setting up and managing portfolios containing cryptocurrencies. It achieves this through the use of the Polkadot blockchain network.

Raison D’etre:

Polkadot, designed by Gavin Wood, is like an internet of blockchains. It is the communication protocol that Melon needed to manage digital assets across multiple blockchains. 

Right now there is no safe way to give the ability to secure and manage digital assets to another entity. Evidenced by the ongoing occurrence of hacks on digital asset exchanges - $70M in the Bitfinex hack alone. There is also no sure way to determine the performance of portfolio managers in the digital asset space. Melon solves these problems:

by allowing portfolio owners to maintain control of the digital assets contained therein, while allowing a manager to adjust the exposure to each asset.

By tracking the performance of individual asset managers using the provability, provable history of the Polkadot protocol.

What factors have converged to create a need for Melon?

There is already a wealth of valuable digital assets emerging as a result of the development of blockchain. The digitization of securities like Overstock equity represent yet another new class of digital asset. To fully take advantage of the correlation properties, fluidity, programmability, and low counterparty and custodian risk these assets have to offer, infrastructure is needed to allow traditional financial roles to exist in the digital world.

Content: Mona Elisa, Reto Trinkler, Arthur Falls

http://www.melonport.com/

http://polkadot.network/

https://twitter.com/perham83

https://twitter.com/reto_trinkler

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In Brief: The DAO hacker and Geth attacker have left a trail of evidence that can provide high quality identifying information about their persons.

Bok Khoo is an actuary in the finance industry and software enthusiast. Recently Bok has turned his interest toward blockchain forensics. In particular tracing malicious actors on the Ethereum network.

https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/100-tricky-stick-puzzles-disrupt-the-ethereum-devcon2-conference-in-shanghai/

https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/the-ongoing-ethereum-attacks/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/58hhry/the_ongoing_ethereum_attacks_work_in_progress/

https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/the-dao-hackers-booty-is-on-the-move/

Content: Bok Khoo, Arthur Falls

**In Brief:**

Chinese multinational, Wanxiang Group, has purchased over 700 hectares of land on which to build a smart city where it plans to experiment with blockchain based systems.

Wanxiang Group is a Chinese multinational focused primarily on automotive parts manufacturing. Recently Wanxiang has been moving into finance and agriculture. Now, with the establishment of the Wanxiang Blockchain Labs research organization and Fenbushi Capital investment fund, Wanxiang is making big moves into the blockchain space. To add to the intrigue, the group recently purchased 770 hectares of land in the Chinese province of Hangzhou where it plans to build a “smart city”. The goal is to house it's many employees in a setting that makes use of it's technological portfolio.

Andy Dan, Project Manager of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs joins to discuss what is quickly becoming the most epic of blockchain stories.

http://www.blockchainlabs.org/

http://fenbushi.vc/

Content: Andy Dan, Arthur Falls

Sometimes the urge to layer in-jokes into a podcast title is impossible to resist. . . and then 24hrs later you change it.

The effort to understand the significance of type based and functional programming languages led me to the Urbit project. This attempt to re-design the internet is one of a number of technologies that have evolved alongside blockchain and address some of the same problems. The Urbit developer's focus on mechanical perfection is a sensibility worth observing.

The first title was in reference to Mike Goldin's tweet about deterministic finite automata:

https://twitter.com/voidsnax/status/712044031090540545

This from the Urbit website:

"We believe controlling your own data, code and identity is the definition of digital freedom. We believe everyone needs digital freedom, not just a few hackers. We believe the only tool needed to solve this problem is a general-purpose server made for human beings.

Your urbit is your cryptographic identity, personal archive, application platform, and device hub. It's as easy to manage as an iPhone."

Content: Galen Wolfe-Pauly, Curtis Yarvin, Arthur Falls

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In many ways still a frontier nation, Australia's style of innovation is practical and direct. Three of the startups covered in todays interviews come from industries outside of tech, each looking to blockchain to solve a problem unique to their industries. Finhaus Labs, a research and consulting team offers supporting services and friendly advice to these, and the rest of the local blockchain business community.

Interviews:

Nick Addison, Finhaus Labs

Connor Svendsen, independent

Emma Weston, Full Profile. Full Profile is a first purchase agricultural finance provider using a blockchain rail to minimize first payment counterparty risk for producers.

Tim Lea, Veridictum. Veridictum is a video piracy prevention tool focussed on the theft of content on social media. Tim Lea is the author of Down the Rabbit Hole: Discover the Power of the Blockchain

John Pellew, Othera. The team at Othera aim to enable the sale of credit backed tokens on the Ethereum public blockchain and provide tools for tracking the provenance and measuring the yield and risk profile of each asset.

Content: Nick Addison, Connor Svendson, Emma Weston, Tim Lea, John Pellew

Additional music provided by Dreamers Delight

https://twitter.com/naddison

https://twitter.com/emmamweston

https://twitter.com/timothylea2

http://downtherabbithole.news/

http://othera.com.au/

http://finhaus.com.au/

http://www.fullprofile.com.au/

http://www.veredcitum.io/

Core samples from oil wells can be worth more than gold. BHP Billiton, one of the largest mining companies in the world, is piloting a program to track their custodianship and provenance using IPFS and Ethereum.

Not only is this an interesting use case, but it is also the first time we have seen a production deployment of both IPFS and Ethereum.

If you would like to contact Tyler, please email me at the address mentioned in the podcast.

https://twitter.com/FreeMyVunk

https://twitter.com/arthurfalls

Content: Arthur Falls, R. Tyler Smith PHD

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