This is an excerpt from the March Blockchain Report (Pg. 7) due out today summarizing the blockchain technology and digital currency industry for the month of March 2016
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
March continued the 2016 blockchain bandwagon hop, however, this month took a slight turn.
For the majority of the 1st quarter banks, startups like R3CEV, and organization such as the Linux Foundation have saturated the media with promises of private blockchains that will rule the world.
Industry professionals starting speak to the contrary in March starting with CFTC advisor Paul Chou.
Chou and a list of others including including Digital Currency Group CEO, Barry Silbert, Silver Lake Partners founder Glenn Hutchings, Xapo CEO Wences Casares, and ShapeShift.io CEO Erik Voorheesand, to name a few, have spoken out against the belief that these “blockchains” would actually work.
This is mainly concerning networks that don’t have any trust mechanism in place other than the current agreements that are flawed now. Without an incentive such as bitcoin there is no reason for anyone to support the network, thus you end up with only the participants involved as the trust. This introduces a large security risk and massive points of failure. Another issue is that beyond the incentive there is no participants other than a list of agreed upon “approval entities” which would serve as “nodes” and even further weakening the concept.
That hasn’t stopped IBM, the Linux Foundation putting out concepts or R3CEV grouping banks together to attempt making it a possibility. Both of which we saw in March.
BLOCKCHAIN APPLICATIONS
Beyond that private networks Overstock.com furthered its T0 platform which runs as a sidechain recording on the blockchain and Ubitquity presented its Title and Deed application that records deeds on the blockchain. Both have further stated that they are “blockchain agnostic” and can use other blockchains if required. In Overstocks case, the SEC approved the blockchain (bitcoin) unless “otherwise stated” but expect a review if they try to use the Potcoin network.
Rootstock raised considerable funds to build a smart contract platform on top of the blockchain (bitcoin).
Etherum saw its network use grow as well as its token price (see Ether below) and also attracted further support from Microsoft’s with new Solidity integration with Microsoft’s development IDE, Visual Studio.
In a rather unexpected move, Disney’s quietly hopped on the blockchain bandwagon. The entertainment giant actively began recruiting for an intern of the electrical or software ebngineering flavor to assist in building a possible blockchain-ish security based
HACKS AND OUTAGES
Bitquick and Cryptsy all saw major outages with Bitquick going offline due to a security breach estimated at a 2 week downtime period and Cryptsy going offline possibly for good.
TCJam, a peer-to-peer loan service similar to Loanbase went offline indefinitely for United States users. It has discontinued service in the US.
DIGITAL CURRENCY AND TRADE
Ethereum’s token, Ether, held around $10/$11 coin for the majority of the month. Despite the hype around Ether, it was Dash that outperformed all altcoins. Fash enjoyed an increase to just over $7. Litecoin closed around $3.03 with little change since February.
Bitcoin closed the month at around $416 hitting as high as $428 down slightly from the previous month and 42 continues remains the most useless but valuable digital currency at $877.08 which is down from its 2016 high of over $1500.
Coinbase blundered with allowing only 1% of the United States to use debit cards, but made up for it by adding stop orders to the Coinbase exchange.
LEGAL CRIME SCAMS AND PONZI’s
The Mt. Gox saga continues with Mizuho Bank facing a Class Action Lawsuit in United States. The lawsuit claims the bank continued to accept funds into Mt Gox which piled onto the heap of value that was eventually sucked down during the implosion.
The Crypsy saga continued with bizarre claims of hackers recovering coins followed by hackers being trolls and ending with Cryptsy possibly going full Gox and currently they have been offline for days.
Russia proposes a seven year prison sentence for digital currency issuers and a New York bitcoin day trader was arrested and charged with operating an unregistered and unlicensed money service business, although it had nothing to do with the Bitlicense, the offenses took place long before the BitLicense came to fruition and additionally the individual was violating his probation by using a computer.
Reported by Alba Gei
Original article from Match 2016 Issue or The Blockchain Report - dinbits media
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