After a successful career in payments and digital identity. Philip is now focusing on enabling the ability to vote from our mobile phone.
Why do we allow lobbyists to have so much influence?
Why do members of Congress forget the people they represent and focus on themselves and the will of the vocal minorities?
Why are people so willing to embrace conspiracy theories and follow such charismatic leaders as Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler?
Why can’t the media simply provide a neutral report of the news and not taint the news with opinion?
Why has this country become so divided?
It is 11 AM December 6 and I wonder about the past and future of the United States of America. The news is divided. There are those that focus on the Trump-centric right-wing media. There are then those that focus on the Biden-centric left-wing media. The challenge where is the truth. For those capable and willing to watch both sides of the story we may be able to fathom reality. For those fixated on one side or the other, they are no longer are capable of appreciating where the middle of this country lies.
November 3 we had an election and over the next several weeks it became clear that Joe Biden would be our new president. Unfortunately, the current president Donald Trump could not nor would not accept the fact he lost.
In 2016 the popular vote said he lost. Based on how our Constitution is written, the electoral college decided he won. We had to accept this truth and we had to get on with life.
The challenge, since then we have had to live with the lies, the untruths, and the constant cry “fake news”. We had to deal with the constant barrage of POTUS reminding us he is a narcissist, he is the president of the United States, and recognize he was allowed to lie to the public. Is he sane one might ask. Are we?
While walking the beach at the moment of the low tide the idea of the digital native emerge. A boy maybe 5 years of age, clearly born to this age. Am I simply a digital immigrant born as computer emerged as massive tabulating machines. Paper tape and punch cards I remember loading into computers as I fit learned how easy it was to cause a computer to go into an endless loop.
Communications and the protocols designed to assure the delivery of binary data. Keyboards, printers and screenc capable of inputting and outputting letters and number we these living creates could comprehend. Cable and sound waves allowed us to transfer these streams of commands and information across what was to become to information highway we now call the Internet. Our imagination was limited by speed of the technology until we harnessed light and shot it down a fiber cable capable of traversing great oceans and deep under our city streets. Far off lands and ships floating on the ocean surface could be reached with radio waves bounced off of satellite high above our heads.
People who came before us struggle to appreciate what how technology has reshaped the world. They knew of telegraph and the telephone and probably remember speaking to an operator to make a connection. For them to grasp the ability to actually use a watch similar to what Dick Tracy used is science fiction made real. Their children, my generation, grew up with the television and as a teenager watch Neal Armstrong walk on the moon. We grew up worrying about termo nuclear disaster whereas our parents grew up being told of the great war when men spent years hunker down in trenches and dieing on battle field in the tens of thousands. They came age as we learned how to harness the atom and decimate cities with a single bomb blast.
Since early February, we here in the United States have had to live with the coronavirus and its economic implications. Over the last two weeks, we have confronted with the reality of our racist tendencies. Over the last 20+ years, this country has fractured into the left the Democrats and the right the Republicans; groups like the tea party have driven these tribal tendencies who wish to engender their thoughts on everyone.
The sense of discomfort that lives within my soul creates tensions and a sense of despair. If only we could see the light. If only we could believe the truth. If only we could come together as one people each of us would be much happier and able to live a more productive and satisfying life
What can I do? What can you do to change the way we think to change the way we act to change the way we embrace each other? Some would remind us of the works of great religious leaders such as Jesus Christ, Lao-Tzu, Confucius Siddhartha Gautama. Men and I am sure women who have spoken of peace and tranquility. They talked about friendship and the bonds of togetherness? It is these bonds of friendship we have to find again. It is the ability to accept and embrace each other we need to remember. We need to stop arguing with each other. We need to start embracing each other. We need to remember that debate is a good thing, while arguments are not.
When I was a young man, I believed it would take three generations for us to address are the racial tensions in this country. I think my problem then was from which age do we begin; it was not the generation that I came from the baby boomers. Maybe not even Gen X. It needs to have a fresh start. It needs to be built on the beliefs of togetherness. Yesterday evening we watched a documentary about Thurgood Marshall. I had no idea how complexed the arguments and the legal battles have been to reach where we are today. The Jim Crow laws so divisive created the division in the South. Separate but equal established a baseline to segregate those of color from those who believed they had the power.
I so much want to walk forward into a world where peace is the norm where cooperation is how we work together. But, the tension, the tribal tendency, seems to be deeply ingrained in our human psyche. It is the human psyche we need to address. We need to transform our thinking from that of fight and right to that of compassion, cooperation, and solidarity.
What more can I say? I can only pray that ‘we the people’ will find the way forward. That ‘we the people,’ will work together to find a more peaceful union. That we, the people, will finally achieve what the founders envisioned. What some would say God offered us in the Garden of Eden before we fit into the fruit of knowledge. We should harness understanding for good.
In March 2020, I moved from the payments industry into the election industry. This movement caused me to wonder about democracy, politics, academia, and the world of technology. What amazed me is how computer science academics could rail at the idea, technology could be used to innovate on the election process. Years ago I imagined participating in a national referendum simply by opening a browser searching for the government website and voting on the measures and contests currently under consideration.
Unfortunately what I’ve learned troubles me. Certain clusters of intelligent individuals believe that they know best. They stigmatize technology and argue that a human being, who writes software, could leave unintended bugs which might lead to unintended consequences. They forget software is an evolutionary science. Through piloting, continuous improvement, testing, and rigorous testing we can eliminate bugs and create stable and secure critically important applications serving our financial, health, national security, and public interests.
Recently in a letter written by verified voting, a nonprofit organization, the word settled science appeared. An intriguing word, an intriguing phrase. I was driven to wonder what did it mean. From my high school years, science was an evolutionary process. A hypothesis was put forward. it was tested. If it was found to be false a new hypothesis was offered, it was tested and on the scientific community went. In one article when googling “Settled Science” I was intrigued to read the word oxymoron followed by an explanation of how if Sir Isaac Newton’s beliefs had been settled science Albert Einstein would never have been able to put forward the concepts of general relativity.
This whole conversation feels very much like a religion, a church, who has a dogmatic belief in the written word of the Bible being the written and only word of God. We forget how man inserts himself into every dialogue. Too often we insert our beliefs on others. Maybe “Settled Science” is the dogmatic belief that we are right and everyone else is wrong.
If this is the case then how do we move forward? If scientists – academics force there will on society than society has lost its objectivity.
When we listen to the news, we must think first of the bias of the reporter. This unfortunate truth is troubling in a world where the United States leader speaks of fake news and uses Twitter to stir up the masses. This body of citizens struggles with truth and is easily bent to believe what the leader says.
This particular charismatic leader, like many others in the past, can cause people to believe anything. The challenge, these same people will follow both those with high morals and those without.
Jesus Christ, Siddhartha Gautama, Confucius, Laozi, and a few others spoke wisely and became spiritual leaders many continue to follow.
To name one well remembered, Hitler, like the recent President of this great country, spread lies, and fermented hatred.
How can we rise above when so many are unwilling or unable to see the truth. We must rise above the madness these charismatic immoral individuals ferment.
That is the concern I have felt since first I looked upon the control a church exerts upon the mass.
This article offers an interesting perspective on what we believe Heaven and Hell is. It draws one to think like much of what history is. It is the thinking of people designed to categorize and allows one to pridefully assume they are either the best or the worst.
Hell therefore in thinking this way, it is for all those people who do not believe as you or are wrong because you are right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/christianity-religion-hell-bible.html
Once the faith of his youth had faded into the serene agnosticism of his mature years, Charles Darwin found himself amazed that anyone could even wish Christianity to be true. Not, that is, the kindlier bits – “Love thy neighbor” and whatnot – but rather the notion that unbelievers (including relatives and friends) might be tormented in hell forever.
It’s a reasonable perplexity, really. And it raises a troubling question of social psychology. It’s comforting to imagine that Christians generally accept the notion of a hell of eternal misery not because they’re emotionally attached to it, but because they see it as a small, inevitable zone of darkness peripheral to a larger spiritual landscape that – viewed in its totality – they find ravishingly lovely. And this is true of many.
But not of all. For a good number of Christians, hell isn’t just a tragic shadow cast across one of an otherwise ravishing vista’s remoter corners; rather, it’s one of the landscape’s most conspicuous and delectable details. If one happens to conduct a bible study, most often they might be presented with the same information.
I know whereof I speak. I’ve published many books, often willfully provocative, and have vexed my share of critics. But only recently, in releasing a book challenging the historical validity, biblical origins, philosophical cogency, and moral sanity of the standard Christian teaching on the matter of eternal damnation, have I ever inspired reactions so truculent, uninhibited, and (frankly) demented.
I expect, of course, that if people have taken up specific youth ministry lessons, they can defend the faith they’ve been taught. What I find odd is that, in my experience, raising questions about this particular detail of their faith evinces a more indignant and hysterical reaction from many believers than would almost any other challenge to their convictions. Something unutterably precious is at stake for them. Why?
After all, the idea comes to us in such a ghastly gallery of images: late Augustinianism’s unbaptized babes descending in their thrashing billions to a perpetual and condign combustion; Dante’s exquisitely psychotic dreamscapes of twisted, mutilated, broiling souls; St. Francis Xavier morosely informing his weeping Japanese converts that their deceased parents must suffer an eternity of agony; your poor old palpitant Aunt Maude on her knees each night in a frenzy of worry over her reprobate boys; and so on.
Surely it would be welcome news if it turned out that, on the matter of hell, something got garbled in transmission. And there really is room for doubt.
No truly accomplished New Testament scholar, for instance, believes that later Christianity’s opulent mythology of God’s eternal torture chamber is clearly present in the scriptural texts. It’s entirely absent from St. Paul’s writings; the only eschatological fire he ever mentions brings salvation to those whom it tries (1 Corinthians 3:15). Neither is it found in the other New Testament epistles, or in any extant documents (like the Didache) from the earliest post-apostolic period. There are a few terrible, surreal, allegorical images of judgment in the Book of Revelation, but nothing that, properly read, yields a clear doctrine of eternal torment. Even the frightening language used by Jesus in the Gospels, when read in the original Greek, fails to deliver the infernal dogmas we casually assume to be there.
On the other hand, many New Testament passages seem – and not metaphorically – to promise the eventual salvation of everyone. For example: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.” (Romans 5:18) Or: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22) Or: “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:2) (Or: John 13:32; Romans 11:32; 1 Timothy 2:3-6; 4:10; Titus 2:11; and others.)
Admittedly, much theological ink has been spilled over the years explaining away the plain meaning of those verses. But it’s instructive that during the first half millennium of Christianity – especially in the Greek-speaking Hellenistic and Semitic East – believers in universal salvation apparently enjoyed their largest presence as a relative ratio of the faithful. Late in the fourth century, in fact, the theologian Basil the Great reported that the dominant view of hell among the believers he knew was of a limited, “purgatorial” suffering. Those were also the centuries that gave us many of the greatest Christian “universalists”: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Didymus the Blind, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Diodore of Tarsus and others.
Of course, once the Christian Church became part of the Roman Empire’s political apparatus, the grimmest view naturally triumphed. As the company of the baptized became more or less the whole imperial population, rather than only those people personally drawn to the faith, spiritual terror became an ever more indispensable instrument of social stability. And, even today, institutional power remains one potent inducement to conformity on this issue.
Still, none of that accounts for the deep emotional need many modern Christians seem to have for an eternal hell. And I don’t mean those who ruefully accept the idea out of religious allegiance, or whose sense of justice demands that Hitler and Pol Pot get their proper comeuppance, or who think they need the prospect of hell to keep themselves on the straight and narrow. Those aren’t the ones who scream and foam in rage at the thought that hell might be only a stage along the way to a final universal reconciliation. In those who do, something else is at work.
Theological history can boast few ideas more chilling than the claim (of, among others, Thomas Aquinas) that the beatitude of the saved in heaven will be increased by their direct vision of the torments of the damned (as this will allow them to savor their own immunity from sin’s consequences). But as awful as that sounds, it may be more honest in its sheer cold impersonality than is the secret pleasure that many of us, at one time or another, hope to derive not from seeing but from being seen by those we leave behind.
How can we be winners, after all, if there are no losers? Where’s the joy in getting into the gated community and the private academy if it turns out that the gates are merely decorative and the academy has an inexhaustible scholarship program for the underprivileged? What success can there be that isn’t validated by another’s failure? What heaven can there be for us without an eternity in which to relish the impotent envy of those outside its walls?
Not to sound too cynical. But it’s hard not to suspect that what many of us find intolerable is a concept of God that gives inadequate license to the cruelty of which our own imaginations are capable.
An old monk on Mount Athos in Greece once told me that people rejoice in the thought of hell to the precise degree that they harbor hell within themselves. By which he meant, I believe, that heaven and hell alike are both within us all, in varying degrees, and that, for some, the idea of hell is the treasury of their most secret, most cherished hopes – the hope of being proved right when so many were wrong, of being admired when so many are despised, of being envied when so many have been scorned.
And as Jesus said (Matthew 6:21), “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
David Bentley Hart is the author, most recently, of “That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation.”
The Sunday after Christmas and one wonders if people are here thinking of family, food, fun. Or, if they are reflecting on the wonder of words Jesus spoke, the majesty of his message and the wholeness of the teaching of love, peace, mercy, and friendship.
Instead, one is drawn to reflect on reality. A world divided along religious, racial and cultural lines. Be it right from left, liberal from conservative or male from female.
I was once told to never ask the WHY question. Yet, it is this one question we each must consider when we think of the divisions surrounding us.
A new year is around the corner. The ability to change is inherent in all of us. the challenge is to put friendship and love first. Then we can think of bounty and the goodness of this earth.
First, we must put our mind to preserving the majesty of what the creator enabled.
This morning hash rates, degrees of difficulty and the creating of derivatives to moderate the risk of Bitcoin mining drew me in. Several years ago I was asked to participate in a fireside chat on Crypto-currencies at the Federal Reserve in Atlanta.
One of my concerns then and still today is the exponential growth in the cost of mining. These charts offer a perspective on a concept called the Hash Rate, a measure of the work necessary to create a block.
Clearly, as time marches forward, the work to earn the reward gets harder. Thus creating a need to increase the fees charged to add a transaction within a block to the chain.
When people speak to the justification of Bitcoin they would speak to the reduction in cost. Is this statement still valid?
While considering the potential of Bitcoin; the working of our government rambles on, as we consider the fate of the American President. Lies, bribes, abuse, and obstruction seems to be the order of the day.
The division between political parties; drives division within families, cities, and two people sitting together over lunch creates animosity.
We are now a world driven to speculate or better said gamble while not wanting to find a gentle and graceful road to mutual satisfaction.
We need to reflect consider and potential restore faith in what is real, what is just and what is fair for all.
Spending money on machines of war instead of investing in education and our environment makes no sense to this lone individual. We need to once again seek peace and justice.
The idea of my identity, your identity, and our identity took me on a journey into social norms, physical realities, spiritual considerations, psychological consideration, and philosophy. Starting with the classic approach of learning the definition of a word takes us to the dictionary. What then assured the complexity of my quest is each of several definitions is similar, but, not the same.
I then found an interesting quote:
G.K. Chesterton once observed that the “special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” His point was that moderns have forgotten that they are assuming what they believe to be a given. “In short,” he concludes, “they always have an unconscious dogma; and an unconscious dogma is the definition of a prejudice.”
With this thinking in mind on definition stood out:
I then thought of the various ways people expand on this word Identity and began to build a list.
I am convinced my list is not complete. What I can say is each item can be found in an article, definition or other written material produced by others.
John 23:1 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD. 2 Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD. 3 Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4 I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the LORD. Woe to the shepherds {officials, kings, priests governors} who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD. 2 Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD. 3 Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4 I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the LORD.
When I read this passage of today’s liturgy, I was drawn to think of the Shepperd as those responsible for leading and the sheep those who are led. If the shepherds seek to control Kajol and threaten the sheep with taxes, racist jargon or lies wind up with a tribe bent to the will of these malicious leaders who seek to profit from the efforts of others.
One is then drawn to ponder the colonial instincts of various nations to subjugate others to their will.
Tribalism, nationalism, and racism are all driven by greed, and a belief one is better than another.
Reviewing Facebook comments I worry for some who have lost sight of the center. We as a country or maybe we as a globe appear to be splintering into two oppositional groupings.
With this in mind, we should look back in history. 
At 5 PM June 16th, 1858 Abraham Lincoln spoke in the Springfield Illinois Hall of Representatives. He spoke of the issue of slavery yet if we reflect on the bigger issue he was also speaking to those who still insist on racial, religious or any other difference as reason for segregation.
If we delve back in time we find in Luke 11:17, Matthew 12:25 and Mark 3:25 writings of how Jesus spoke of a simple reality. Every Kingdom or house divided against itself will be laid waste, become a desert, fall upon itself or will not stand.
Brother will kill brother
Who is this God of one place. It is not the God of my imagination. The God of my imagination extends far beyond Israel, extends to all mankind.
God is a spirit who does not care how we worship. God only seeks the memory of the grace of God, the story of those who spoke boldly of each of our responsibility to love and do for others as we would expect to be loved. The doing is the key to our social engagement.
Generational poverty this is the bane of our society. This division between those that are brought up with and those brought up without. How do those without escape poverty. What hand reaches out across the abyss to help those without.
Or is it capitalism without a thought for society. The innovation capitalism and the effort of those who can is significantly better than the concept of a society managed by the few for the many. When there is nothing unique to be gained for our effort, the desire to do our best is lost. The flaw of capitalism is when wealth and power become the aims. It is this concentration of wealth and power which takes from the many to benefit the few.
We must find a method to merge the good of capitalism with the warmth and humanity of socialism. We must help the powerful to appreciate their role to help the many. We need to find a way to share wealth while assuring the individual desire to innovate and strive to create, Shepard’s and be good stewards.
Nature, the resources and the spirit within society and this earth are here to be employed, conserved and cherished. When greed wants for me and my pride assumes I am better than you then we lose and society slips into conflict within itself and with its neighbors.
Today at Church the sermon started with a reading of Wacky Wednesday. A story of how we wake and nothing fits into place or is as it should be.
Our rector then proceeds to like it to today’s passage in Luke’s Gospel
21:7 They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” 8 And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’* and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.
9 “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” 10 Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; 11 there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.
12 “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. 13 This will give you an opportunity to testify. 14 So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; 15 for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. 16 You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. 17 You will be hated by all because of my name. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your souls.
The sermon reminds us of the time after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. I, maybe we, are caused to reflect on current times. I wonder of the impeachment investigation. I worry of the conflicts within families. The fractured nature of civil society. The structure of our economy where wealth accumulates at the top and flows away from those in the lower 50%. A a global worry; driven by dictators tyrants, democracies and republics. No social system has yet found the way of balance.
Battles of religion and belief bring lose, assure destruction and feed those that profit from conflict.
Our spiritual leaders, Jesus Christ, the vortex of so many before, brought all of the positive thoughts from within and beyond. Asked each of us to adhere to two simple commandments.
Why can’t we? Is it greed? Is it our pride?
Until we finally understand we are all the same and yet different. Stewards of this earth. Servants here to care for each other.
when the end, is it simply the fear of what we see today and know has been. Is there an end or simply repetition of the continuous conflict between tribes who can’t see the value of love and peace.
Today.
How many passwords are you trying to manage! Does your LinkedIn contact list connecting you to more than 4,000 individuals? Does Facebook, Instagram, and other social media websites inundating you with news and stories about your friends, colleagues and interesting people?
How many cookies have your computers accumulated? How many databases have more information about you than they need? If we search the dark web, how valuable is your data?
Cando seeks to help you manage your data, identity, assets, and relationships.
Philip lives on Sea Island with his 93-year-old father, the Doctor. They pursue travel and Philip keeps his head into what is happening in financial services, blockchain, authentication, digital identity, and, whatever else people seeking to understand the transformation; particularly those in the identity and payments space.
What is happening means we can unlock our hotel rooms, cars, and homes from our phones. Our security system iwill be another app we have to find on our phone.
Instead, we need an intuitive assistant seeking to simplify our lives by taking on repetitive tasks like driving, working inside a data table or simply opening up the house for the season.
Normalizing data and performing the analysis capable of earning value is the name of the game. Management is about stimulating a team to work in the mutual interest of the organization. Executives define the strategy and articulate the vision in a manner conducive to success.
Cando seeks to help you manage your assets and relationships. Assets those places and things you use doing your daily life and those interactions you have with people and entities seeking to serve, sell and partner with you.
Then there are friends who we expect to be part of our lives and therefore have privileges and access capabilities.
All of this with a target of selling integration services to the top million and simply assuring each person has an identity thus serving the bottom billion. ultimately earning $1 per year per user to simply be there when it all breaks and you wish to restore your digital life.
At the core, your digital security will be based on the use of cryptography and sophisticated matching algorithms designed to assure anyone that you are that one individual in the populatations of the universe.
While reading the recent document produced by the IMF I am compelled to wonder.
What is the difference between what they call Bank Deposits and e-money. My first question, ignoring the words bank deposit. Both are electronic accounts of value, recorded in someone’s ledger. These two diagrams extracted from a BIS paper offer a perspective.
They then speak to four attributed to the “means of payment”
They then speak to the five ‘Means of payment”.
Object-Based
As we think of the evolution of these object-based means of payment, we need to reflect on a new term “Central Bank Digital Currency” CBDC.
As a historian, I then wonder where things like Digi-cash and Mondex fit into the classification. The value was originated and then distributed into a personal and secure storage device (Wallet). Redemption or better said the guarantee, was provided by a party. Maybe not a bank or the central bank, yet, easily embraced by such an institution. Somehow history seems to lose sight of the origins of money and assumes the existence of a central bank. Here in the USA, the formation of a Central bank was one of many areas of political discourse.
Claim-Based
The magic word behind all of these discussions is “Liquidity”. The bottom line does the receiver of the money appreciate the value of the unit of measure and is the receiver confident they will be able to convert that money into another form, of their preference
Let’s start at the beginning, the transaction, the distributed ledger entry. Think about the content of the transaction as the payload. Next think of the payload as land deed, cryptocurrency value, record of ownership, journal entry, smart contract … marriage contract. Either two or more people seek to exchange and record. Another way to think about all of this is as a block of data, code or other digital representation of something duplicated in every participant’s copy of the current ledger. No matter what happens, a secure system must be established for a smooth cryptocurrency transaction to take place. Maybe look for the best vpn for crypto trading? Could be an option, but only in the later stages when the initial nitty-gritty of the process is established.
What is essential, before anyone can do anything.
The parties seeking to exploit a distributed ledger must define how it will work.
It is what the community or parties seek to represent and manage, using distributed ledger technology, agree.
The whole process of defining the payload begins when the community agrees to and sets off to publish the processes, procedures, rules, functions, and purpose of their application. It is this act of governance we use to define how and what will be conveyed in the payload to be stored and recorded on a blockchain. Which blockchain, protocol, and cryptographic processes; obviously it is a decision of the community.
We need to be clear before we can do anything with the payload. Ourselves and ultimately others will have initially and subsequently defined the mechanics and processes designed to assure the integrity of the blockchain itself.
There are two parties to each event recorded within these transactions. The agreed events, transactions and smart contracts are ultimately included in a block and properly extended onto the chain for everyone to see and read. More about Confidentiality in another post.
Each party has an address and then addresses unique to each asset e.g. coin. The address, in most cases, is simply an asymmetric cryptographic public key.
When the two parties decide to record an event; the sale or transfer of the title to a car.
The transactions are broadcast to the network, buying and selling included. These transactions can take place through various methods; for instance, digital currencies could be purchased online, whereas to sell, you may have to use Bitcoin ATM and other ideas, which you can learn on Coin Cloud or similar company blogs.
The nodes or miners continuously work to assemble a defined number of transactions and create the next block.
The chain’s role is to record the providence of an asset and the immutability of all the associated transactions.
By being the first to calculate the cryptographic nonce
The winner receives a reward.
Around and around the game continues, as transactions are added and immutably recorded on the chain.
This whole process fundamentally assures history cannot be altered.
If the process is not elegantly managed in full sight of all the participants.
Worth a listen
