Help a non-technical audience to under what shared ledgers are and that the Bitcoin blockchain is only one kind of shared ledger. It includes the YouTube video me presenting at the beginnng.
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Shared Ledger Technologies
16/12/20161
Understanding the blockchain
enough to explain it
to your boss
The Meaning Conference
Brighton
November 2016
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David G.W. Birch
An internationally-recognised thought leader in digital identity and
digital money;
Named one of the global top 15 favourite sources of business
information (Wired magazine);
In the London FinTech top 10 most influential commentators (City
A.M.);
One of the top ten Twitter accounts followed by innovators, along
with Bill Gates and Richard Branson (PR Daily);
One of the top ten most influential voices in banking (Financial
Brand);
Named one of the “Fintech Titans” (NextBank);
Ranked Europe’s most influential commentator on emerging
payments (Total Payments magazine).
2
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Which to Build?
9
How do we make a
shared ledger?
We might use a blockchain,
we might not
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So…
10
Shared ledgers have communications, content, consensus and
contract layers;
Different choices for these layers lead to different kinds of
ledgers;
One set of choices is a blockchain;
And there are different kinds of blockchains…
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Bitcoin uses just one kind of SLT
Yes, I know it’s wrong but hey it’s the FT
11
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Why Bother? Trustless Transactions
14
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good.
Choruses from The Rock (T.S. Eliot, 1934).
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Long Term Vision
15
What will we do with a
shared ledger?
Make new markets
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Translucent Transactions
Trust is a serious problem, we have to get to a new level of transparency –
only through radical transparency will we get to radical new levels of trust
(Marc Benioff, Davos 2015)
18
ambient-accountability.org
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Visit our website: http://www.chyp.com
Follow us on Twitter: @chyppings
Email us: info@chyp.com
Read: Tomorrow's Transactions Blog
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Contact
16/12/201619
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Who Are Consult Hyperion?
20
Consult Hyperion specialises in working out the opportunities
and threats which result from the harmony and collision of
security, networks and transactions.
We are constantly assessing these factors, as they change
continuously, and delivering ideas, solutions and products to our
clients
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What Do They Do?
21
We have a structured and practical approach to secure
electronic transaction systems from the local to the global
Strategy
Roadmapping
Market Analysis
Business Modelling
Prototyping
Requirements Analysis
Risk Analysis
System Architecture
Technical Specification
Procurement Support
Software Development
Vendor Management
Project Management
Certification Management
Acceptance Testing
Evaluation
We can help clients in all phases of the product and service lifecycle, from the whiteboard scribble to
the person in the street’s everyday use
A ledger is record of transactions
If more than one organisation is involved, whose ledger?
We used to have to trust someone to maintain a ledger
Or we could federate and each maintain our own part of the ledgers
Now, thanks to Moore’s Law, everyone can now have a copy of the entire ledger
A ledger is record of transactions
If more than one organisation is involved, whose ledger?
We used to have to trust someone to maintain a ledger
Or we could federate and each maintain our own part of the ledgers
Now, thanks to Moore’s Law, everyone can now have a copy of the entire ledger
The second is transparency. As I mentioned in the discussion about the "glass bank", transparency may be the defining characteristic of the new financial order and I expect this to be a focus of our clients' attention in the near future. I advance the theory here that the next generation of financial applications will focus on transparency as the key to the new way of doing things: the robustness and the innovation are great, but it is in area of transparency that new cryptographic techniques make it possible to create a new kind of ledger. I'll write more about this in the future, but I will exploring the idea that transparency may be the lasting legacy of the financial crisis in my keynote at Next Bank Barcelona on
Transparency increases confidence and trust, helping markets to develop. A story from the August 1931 edition of Popular Mechanics illustrated this point. It concerns the relationship between transparency and behaviour in the specific case of depression-era extra-judicial unlicensed wealth redistribution (Glass banks will foil hold-ups 1931) and says that banks hold-ups may become things of the past if banks are constructed with glass walls, so that a clear view of everything that is happening inside the bank will be afforded from all angles at all times. (I urge you search the article, by the way, to see the lovely drawing that goes with it.)
The chap behind the idea was a New York architect called Francis Keally (1889-1978), the man responsible for (amongst other things) the Berlin Public Library and the Oregon State Capitol. He reasoned that transparency would be a fundamental defence against crime. No walls, no Bernie Madoff.
In our world of 21st century finance we no longer care about the glass bank as a physical construct, we see it as a virtual one. While toughened glass and other architectural advances might have been the key to building Keally’s glass bank, the crucial technology to build the glass institutions that will revolutionise financial services today is the shared ledger.
The idea of glass institutions may seem odd but with the advances in technology and our evolving understanding of how replicated shared ledgers might transform a variety of different kinds of systems, I think we can begin to explore their impact, which is disruptive change. I can show this by giving a couple of obvious examples: what if a company chose from a group of regulator-certified auditing applications instead of from a competing group of auditors? Auditing banks’ books would become a continual process and you might even have multiple different applications constantly auditing the same bank on behalf of regulators, shareholders, customers, pressure groups and even rival banks. Anti-money-laundering processes would shift from expensive and rather useless gatekeeping combined with floods of suspicious transaction monitoring to being a variety of different anti-money-laundering applications combing through the shared ledger entries to find transactions indicative of misbehaviour (at which point, law enforcement agencies could apply for warranted access to the unencrypted ledger entry or relevant meta data).
Transparency increases confidence and trust, helping markets to develop. A story from the August 1931 edition of Popular Mechanics illustrated this point. It concerns the relationship between transparency and behaviour in the specific case of depression-era extra-judicial unlicensed wealth redistribution (Glass banks will foil hold-ups 1931) and says that banks hold-ups may become things of the past if banks are constructed with glass walls, so that a clear view of everything that is happening inside the bank will be afforded from all angles at all times. (I urge you search the article, by the way, to see the lovely drawing that goes with it.)
The chap behind the idea was a New York architect called Francis Keally (1889-1978), the man responsible for (amongst other things) the Berlin Public Library and the Oregon State Capitol. He reasoned that transparency would be a fundamental defence against crime. No walls, no Bernie Madoff.
In our world of 21st century finance we no longer care about the glass bank as a physical construct, we see it as a virtual one. While toughened glass and other architectural advances might have been the key to building Keally’s glass bank, the crucial technology to build the glass institutions that will revolutionise financial services today is the shared ledger.
The idea of glass institutions may seem odd but with the advances in technology and our evolving understanding of how replicated shared ledgers might transform a variety of different kinds of systems, I think we can begin to explore their impact, which is disruptive change. I can show this by giving a couple of obvious examples: what if a company chose from a group of regulator-certified auditing applications instead of from a competing group of auditors? Auditing banks’ books would become a continual process and you might even have multiple different applications constantly auditing the same bank on behalf of regulators, shareholders, customers, pressure groups and even rival banks. Anti-money-laundering processes would shift from expensive and rather useless gatekeeping combined with floods of suspicious transaction monitoring to being a variety of different anti-money-laundering applications combing through the shared ledger entries to find transactions indicative of misbehaviour (at which point, law enforcement agencies could apply for warranted access to the unencrypted ledger entry or relevant meta data).