Nine of the World’s Biggest Banks Join to Form Blockchain Partnership: CNBC
Could a Augur lead to corruption in racing?: Racing Post
Cryptome PGP Keys are compromised, reissued: Qntra
Scaling Bitcoin Day 2 Wrapup: CoinDesk
An old article about R3CEV, The Company Partnering With The Banks: CoinDesk
Original Photo by Dafne Cholet: Flickr
It is difficult to predict exactly what the bank partnership means in the big picture of things. I don’t think anyone, including the banks or R3CEV, will know for a year at least; it is just too early to say. What it does show, is that they are taking Bitcoin seriously. The Bitcoin community used to joke about the world’s elite bankers getting together in smokey backrooms, discussing the implications of blockchain technologies and what they can do to not fall behind, but that doesn’t seem far off from reality these days. I wonder if any of them wore monocles during the meetings that led to this partnership.
The CoinDesk piece on R3CEV isn’t “old” by normal standards, it is from July of this year. It is just old in Bitcoin terms. It does give a look into the company’s thinking. Another thing to keep in mind, DigiCash reportedly had partnerships with banks, but one of the things that held it back is that it wasn’t accepted by enough banks to be useful. Bitcoin gets around that problem by simply being itself, but it is heartening to see nine banks work on something together, so whatever they build, a large portion of the industry will be on board with the same standards, whatever they end up being.
I find the Augur article extremely interesting. It is nice to see a journalist from outside of the cryptocurrency and tech worlds have such a strong understanding of Bitcoin 2.0 tech, even if he is writing about something that could be perceived as a negative.
Will horse jockeys (or any sport where the amount of money being paid to the participants is dwarfed by what can be won gambling) start betting against themselves? Horse racing, boxing, and other sports with a heavy gambling element have worked extremely hard to clean up corruption. It isn’t easy for a Jockey to just walk up to a ticket window and collect his winnings. Sure, he can do it through another person, but that adds more people that have to be involved. Presuming that the jockey or boxer knows how to wash his coins, he could bet against himself from the comfort of his own home, with almost no electronic trace other than a convoluted blockchain trail that passes through several laundry services, and more important, no confidants.
I suppose it could. Just like 3D printers are leading to anonymous guns and the internet led us to cyber bullying, anonymous prediction markets may have the unintended side effect of making it easier for athletes to profit off of taking a dive. But as Tom Kerr rightly points out in his article, the technology isn’t going away. Like the proverbial bankers in the smokey backrooms, we better just get used to it.
If you have some extra time, we interviewed Augur about a month ago.