Blockchain News for 20 Aug 2017
How Blockchain Gaming Is Evolving The Way Games Are Played
With the gaming industry continuing to grow in size and value, some companies are looking into building games around Blockchain to take advantage of cryptocurrencies, tokens, and their benefits. Whether it might be a trading card game, MMO or RPG, the use of virtual currencies in games is getting popular.
In recent years, games have entered the markets using Blockchain features such as wallets or tokens to secure and back in-game items. This way players have more ownership of the items or currency they loot and purchase. With a Blockchain record, players are guaranteed ownership which gives their items value to both the owner and other players.
Spells of Genesis and Force of Will, are both trading card games where all the cards are linked to the Bitcoin Blockchain. These are linked via Counter-Party tokens which have been linked to a trading card and players can exchange via Blockchain transactions.
“Spells of Genesis allows players to have true ownership of their digital assets through the Bitcoin Blockchain. SoG places some cards on the Blockchain and thus gives them some properties of physical items,” wrote EverdreamSoft, the creators of Spells of Genesis.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2sWSIQT
Source: CoinTelegraph
Microsoft unveils technology to speed up blockchain and its adoption
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) is working on technology that it believes can make blockchain-based systems faster and more private, as it looks to speed up use of the distributed database software by enterprises.
The company said on Thursday that it had developed a system called Coco Framework, which connects to different blockchain networks to solve some of the issues that have slowed down their adoption, including speed and privacy concerns.
Coco, whose names stands for Confidential Consortium, will be ready and made open source by 2018, Microsoft said.
It is currently compatible with Ethereum, one of the most popular types of blockchains and can make it roughly 100 times faster, Microsoft said.
Full story at http://reut.rs/2uzFX3P
Source: Reuters
How Blockchain Can Help Solve Global Regulatory Challenges: Analysis
In today’s world, talk abounds about the ever-increasing regulatory hurdles every modern global industry now faces.
The way to address any risk is to impose more and more regulations on an industry to ensure the sins of the past are not repeated, and politicians can best show the electorate concrete steps in legislation they have developed to prevent future disasters.
The issue currently facing businesses is the ever-increasing burden of regulations responsible for driving up costs.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis has determined regulatory costs of $1.9 tln amounting to 10 percent of the US gross domestic product, which was estimated for 2016 at more than $18.8 tln.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2hYU3pm
Source: CoinTelegraph
You Can Now Hold Ether In Blockchain, One Of The World's Most Popular Cryptocurrency Wallets
With the price of Ethereum's token, ether, up almost 4,000% for the year, Blockchain.info, one of the oldest and most popular user-controlled bitcoin wallets, Thursday adds it as a second currency to the service.
The move gives the 16 million Blockchain wallets access to the second-highest market cap coin, which is used to power smart contracts on the Ethereum platform.
Additionally, the wallet, available in 140 countries, now integrates the crypto-to-crypto exchange Shapeshift so users can easily trade from bitcoin to ether and vice versa.
"The reason we decided to add Ethereum is we really feel like Ethereum as a community, ecosystem and technology has really matured," said Peter Smith, Blockchain's chief executive, of the two-year-old cryptocurrency.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2wblPVF
Source: Forbes
Blockchain Technology Enables Games to Blur the Line Between Reality and Fantasy
The Blockchain revolution is upon us, and the emerging technology is gradually encroaching on every aspect of daily life. The gaming industry is one of the several major sectors, that is being significantly disrupted by Blockchain.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Blockchain technology has introduced a paradigm shift in the gaming industry. One of the biggest changes that Blockchain allows is the integration of digital currencies into game economies. Use of Blockchain technology could allow gamers to exchange in-game items for cryptocurrency in a trustless fashion outside the game.
The CEO of Borderless Corporation, Christopher Franko, notes some benefits of Blockchain being used for gaming. In his opinion, one of the clearest use cases is the replacement of in-game currencies with digital currencies such as Bitcoin.
Franko explains that most games have their own version of in-game tokens, such as World of Warcraft’s gold. He explains that game assets no longer have to be bound to one single game and can be transferred around, creating cross-game functionality.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2wYdQZA
Source: CoinTelegraph
Blockchain May Give Rise To Even Smarter B2B Marketplaces
Does blockchain mean boom or bust for existing B2B networks? On one hand, blockchain -- a series of open and global distributed ledgers -- promises to smooth and validate the interactions that take place between organizations and their customers, partners and suppliers. On the other, blockchain's value proposition is that it takes out the middlemen in transactions, enabling more autonomous type of engagements.
As the dot-com boom crested a couple of decades back, we saw a plethora of online B2B exchanges emerge across key industries, promising electronically delivered communications and trading between hubs, suppliers, customers and other involved parties. Some of these key exchanges have become prominent players within their industries.
Now, blockchain is entering the enterprise mainstream. Recently, some major tech players including Microsoft and Intel have come together to form what they call the "Coco Framework," which offers enterprises the performance, confidentiality, governance, and required processing power they would seek before trusting their assets and data to an unseen, commonly shared platform.
Blockchain promises to eliminate the middlemen in transactions, thanks to its transparent and immutable “smart contracts” embedded within its worldwide code. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Marco De Vries, senior director of product marketing for the OpenText Business Network, which now oversees such longstanding industry B2B networks as Covisint and ANX. For his part, De Vries does not see blockchain as a threat to existing B2B networks, just as previous technology revolutions such as XML have often resulted in more complexity, not less. “We’ve seen the stories of the end of EDI and B2B for a long time,” he points out. “Even if blockchain takes off, for certain industries, it probably isn’t right for every part of the supply chain,” De Vries. “Many predicted AS2 standards would replace B2B networks. What we found with AS2 standards is that organizations actually faced more and more complexity. It’s difficult to keep up with all the changes. There are 50 different XML standards, and if I’m in a lot of different industries, how am I going to keep track? I can’t foresee the world managing their own blockchains.”
Full story at http://bit.ly/2x2nqux
Source: Forbes
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Sent 20 coins.
Everything moving so quickly in this new cryptocurrency world - new to me at least @sydesjokes
I have only been in Cryptocurrencies since Nov 2015 :)
I am very interested in the subject we will see how it develops from this week the blockchain
Upvote & resteem...
Thanks. Will start to record who resteems me :)