a sequel to my article 'besotted with blockchain..'
The history of mankind is replete with tales of POWER, and the many paths to its acquisition, some nefarious.
Power tends to roll into the hands of those who display an obsessive focus to acquire it, more often than to those who want it merely as a means to answer their noble-calling - aka Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi. Leadership is a rare phenomenon, that doesn't happen to normal folks in the course of their plebeian lives. It's a calling that asks for a mammoth sacrifice on the part of the leader. But, the accompanying rush of mobilising humanity to rally around you or to effect a change so transformative to lives on planet is so overpowering that the chosen few possessed by it are fine to forego the pleasures that are for commoners to claim.
To turn off mouse acceleration on OS X you need to open up a terminal and type defaults write.GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1 Then log out and back in, and frankly it still feels off. There is no way at all, short of installing 3rd party software, of turning off mouse wheel acceleration. Mac keyboards use s. Besotted definition is - blindly or utterly infatuated. How to use besotted in a sentence.
Seekers of power have employed ingenious means. While most mass-leaders have unleashed oratory to stir somnolent hoi-polloi to a cause, mostly their cause, some leaders were made by circumstances, mostly their repugnance to circumstances. Quit India, Right to Information Act, Wikileaks etc are some movements that were born out of a pioneer's frustration who refused to accept status quo. Some aspirants to power like Cleopatra and Sonia Gandhi had beauty, seduction prowess and an insatiable appetite for the throne, while some like Hillary had cultivated exceeding tolerance to a powerful husband's egregious indiscretions to stay the course. The curious may read Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel or Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power that is a riveting collection of tales. If there is one characteristic that is more predictive of power than anything else, it is the boldness to acquire it and the skill to hold it. Chandra Babu Naidu & Arvind Kejriwal the Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Delhi are cases in point that usurped power from their powerful predecessors.
Wherever there has been a case of one ruler being all powerful, opposing forces set in motion quite naturally to bring the mighty down. Saddam Hussein the mighty ruler was brought down by a Bush hungry for Iraq's oil power. The mighty Soviet Union was broken down into frail fragments. Now the economic might of USA is being challenged by the emergence of China & India in coming decades. and So the might of Wall Street, that bastion of power and money and all vices that go with it. Churn is the law of nature.
Wall Street has long influenced the fulcrum of power, Pentagon, by show of strength at the hustings. Even so, the mighty can no longer hold on to their trillion dollar empires - for the aliens have landed at their doorstep! The aliens are disrupters. Hungry, brash, fearless, and perhaps a bit foolish too, they have started a revolution. A revolution of thought - why should banking anymore be what it has been in the past several centuries, when everything else has changed dramatically? Short of giving ourselves intravenous shots of nutrition, and copulating with machines, pretty much everything we do as a race has changed unrecognisably in the past few decades!
Students of economics and disruption will understand that unlike demand-side disruption -- of customers moving away from established habit patterns to new and better products, like a Uber, Airbnb, Digital photography, Netflix -- supply-side disruptions often tend to come with newer platforms: like the evolution of social from emails > Facebook, curation from Tumblr > Instagram and Pinterest, news consumption from news sites > Twitter, and personal computing from PCs > smartphones and now wearables, and entertainment from youtube> VR games and VR dating. The differentiating factor of a supply-side disruption is the network effect. You will have to uproot the users of a whole platform and move them to another, which requires the new platform to justify its mass adoption by substantial benefits of cost, time and ease to existing users as well as by bringing new users into the umbrella by substantially eroding resistance. Those who do not care about signing up to classroom courses at Harvard, Wharton or MIT might readily sign up to MOOCs offered by the same universities on mobile. Those who did not subscribe to or care about any news sites earlier, can easily become twitter addicts because it offers news that is easily consumable, faster, crowd-sourced hence more authentic. Plus twitter is also social, and you can interact with just about anyone not just your friends and family. US Presidential candidate Trump and I have exchanged a few tweets in the past, before he put his hat in the ring that is. :-) His books such as Art of the Deal are legend for their candour, and say stuff no business school and no academic researcher will teach. Celebrities who outsource their twitter interactions are missing the point.
In this era of platform disruption, Satoshi invented Blockchain, by accident or design, that can upend many existing platforms. And Banking, famously, is a platform.
I have explained at length what blockchain is about, its potentially massive impact on our lives, and the initial reactions of industry and academia to the phenomenon in my first article on the topic 'besotted by blockchain..'. In this note, I will focus on two things 1. Make it england! Feeding tata mac os. mac os. the rapid strides being made by the Incumbent Platforms that are naturally under threat by blockchain - namely Banking & Financial Services firms, that have much power to lose at their institutionally protected fiefdoms should a disruption set in motion. 2. the opportunity creators that can imagine hitherto non-existent use cases for blockchain and invent entirely New Platforms.
Before we dive into the two kinds of platforms - incumbents and platform opportunists that are now digging into their Porter's 4Cs or some other esoteric strategy matrix or consulting with arcane sciences like astronomy, a little about platforms or 'catalyst models'. Since two-sided platforms are so massively complex and laborious to create and to achieve a critical mass, once they are created - the WINNER TAKES ALL! That is why Facebook is having a giant home run at social networking, gobbling up potential competition like Instagram and WhatsApp. Platform success affords the winner everything it needs to sustain its dominant position - a captive audience that is simply too reluctant to leave its shores enmasse, cash reserves to buy up potential threats at eye-popping valuations, and the monopolistic business liberty to play with product and service features without the threat of customer backlash.
Tell me how effectively have you vented your frustration at clandestinely changed privacy settings at Facebook or your personal data being appropriated for unsolicited pop up ads in gmail?
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Do you really have a choice about pricing of an Apple product?
We have little choice because monopolies are dictators! And the same ingredients go into the making of a monopoly that go into the making of dictator. An insatiable appetite for power and the ruthlessness to hold on to it. Civilities and business proprieties be damned. One look at the legions of 'Microsoft vs People of United States of America' antitrust cases would tell you, how the most civilised business titan would want to quietly serial kill all his competitors. So much for their noble intentions. For the same reason, I am cynical of Zuckerberg's attempt at world domination by offering 'Free Basics' in India which was spurned by India with the same disdain for monopolies.
Platforms are hard to create. They are harder to uproot, once created.
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Because the combination of factors that go into disrupting a platform are hard to manufacture at will. They are more of a force majeure! And therefore, please take a moment to breathe deeply and appreciate the rarity of this occurrence and the prevalence of corresponding conditions that support it - namely the appearance of Blockchain on the horizon of Banking & Financial Services Industry. The sun always rose and set at predetermined times in the erstwhile Banking era, with hardly an eclipse.
Blockchain is the eclipse. It may well be that the sun may go out of view for good, or that better views await you on the morrow! But, eclipsed you are. No denying that.
Incumbent Platforms:
The major innovations that the banking and financial services industry has seen in the past several decades are invention of plastic cards, invention of EMIs, invention of SWIFT, mobile apps, and more recently online platforms for P2P lending, crowdfunding. Barring digital, and some inventive methods such as option pricing or securitisation of select securities - technology has played little role in banking thus far. Technology is something no customer-facing banker ever saw or considered an important element for his ascension in banking hierarchy. It was relegated to the back office non-bankers to deal with the IT providers. But for the occasional upgrades, no banker ever worried about IT, much less thought of it as a piece of critical strategy. The IT departments took years to approve any enterprise software. Once a vendor was in, it was in for decades. No one would take a chance to even change the vendor. The premium was on ideas, and not on sweating back-office stuff. If we didn't even need to know how to create ppt slides, imagine the technology savvy of an average banker! Try telling any Wall Street CEO now, that technology is something that he can leave to his IT department! He would immediately suspect you as having designs on his role. As it were, the wall street CEO shelf-lives are so short, and that is for the best of them. Because it takes a super maniac to ascend to the throne of a wall street CEO, given the legions of maniacs that populate the ultra competitive industry. Most CEOs are made to depart for their predecessor's actions, as boards have to show that they respond to crises. Anyway, banking is such an arcane business where no one understands what really affects the bottomline, as a multitude of complex factors shape the business. Now with Blockchain - suddenly banking CEOs are required to not only understand but master technology.
At its core, blockchain is the email of money. It makes it cheaper and faster to transfer funds or digital assets or securities across geographies, by avoiding the duplication of ledgers and intermediaries entrusted to maintain the ledger. >That disrupts most of the traditional banking.
Also, blockchain is a record keeping system for secure and tamper-proof transactions which makes it possible for any parties to interact with each other based on their digital identities. >This disrupts even the sophisticated finance like derivatives trading, clearing and settlement etc.
Blockchain can enable smart contracts that self-execute based on a trigger condition. A couple can enter into a pre-nuptial agreement, say for example, that should X cheat, such an act of cheating to be agreed upon by predetermined criteria, Y gets to keep all of X's money. Voila! All gold-diggers have much to rejoice and those testosterone fuelled footballers and billionaires much to loathe blockchain for!
Why are Banks quick to react?
Banking has thrived as an industry due to its platform nature. You could not issue a cheque or transfer money to someone unless you are in the banking system. (That tells me Blockchain can now tackle black money too by tracking every expenditure trail) Nor could you borrow money unless someone like a bank vouched for your creditworthiness. Now that platform is under threat. There are already institutions such as Kiva and Loanbase doing microfinance in poor countries, not based on banking scores but on faith in social behaviour and humanity.
Technology is set to overtake banking institutions. So banks have been surprisingly nimble to act. Since it takes a maniac to get to the top, they wouldn't want to give up without a stiff fight - with all they have got! So here is what banks have done. Banks get that if a disruption were to happen in near term, it would more likely be another platform - before it takes the form of an ultimate disruption where banks would disappear altogether in their present form. Possibly! So, they are busy collaborating to create a would-be platform, trying to out-think ways that a disrupter could try to uproot them. Time will tell if such an experiment will succeed as money doesn't always equal brains or execution :P
Dollar investments: US$180 million investments is estimated to have gone into blockchain technology in 2015. Banks' investment in blockchain is expected to reach US$ 400 million by 2019 from US$75 million in 2015.
Innovation Labs: Citibank, UBS, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Bank, Deutsche Bank and State Street have set up innovation labs to study blockchain.
Pilot applications: The Royal Bank of Scotland, JPMoragn, and BNY Mellon have introduced in-house pilot applications to experiment.
Are you still working so late? mac os. Blockchain startups: Banks like Banco Santander, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Nomura and CIBC have invested in blockchain startups.
Banking consortium for Blockchain: A consortium of 42 banks, led by FinTech company R3CEV, is developing a framework for applying blockchain technology to markets. The consortium started on September 15, 2015, with nine firms. R3CEV announced its first distributed ledger experiment, involving 11 of its member banks, using Ethereum and Microsoft Azure's blockchain-as-a-service. The 11 member banks and R3 are connected on a private P2P distributed ledger, underpinned by Ethereum technology, and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure, the public cloud platform offering blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS). (I said earlier that in platforms, Winner takes all - Microsoft being a winner in OS and a technology leader for several decades has the capabilities to ace even blockchain and leverage its network effects. Microsoft entered bitcoin by collaborating with ConsenSys in Nov 2015, to introduce Blockchain as a Service on its Azure platform - an excellent step) These 11 banks in the successfully concluded R3 experiment include Barclays, BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo. Tokens were exchanged in North America, Europe and Asia from January 11 -15, on this private blockchain. The banks simulated exchanging value, represented by tokenized assets on the distributed ledger, without the need for a centralized third party, across the global private network. 'The tokens, or software code representing a theoretical asset, passed between nodes set up by the banks and R3 with no problems. The data about the tokens was intact and the validity of each transaction verified ‘instantaneously' by all nodes,' according to R3.
Patents: Bank of America has filed 15 blockchain patents and in the process of several more.
NASDAQ announced that its blockchain ledger technology, Linq, was able to successfully complete and record a private securities transaction.
Blockchain startup Chain documented the issuance of shares to a private investor using NASDAQ's blockchain-enabled technology.
IBM announced its open ledger project.
Digital Asset Holdings led by wall street veteran Blythe Masters has raised USD60 m investment from Goldman Sachs, JPM, Citi, BNP Paribas, IBM
We hosted several Blockchain debates at Fintech Storm last year, and I personally gave talks on Blockchain at University of Birmingham, Europe-India Conclave New Delhi 2015, and had an informal discussion with Reserve Bank of India.
The major innovations that the banking and financial services industry has seen in the past several decades are invention of plastic cards, invention of EMIs, invention of SWIFT, mobile apps, and more recently online platforms for P2P lending, crowdfunding. Barring digital, and some inventive methods such as option pricing or securitisation of select securities - technology has played little role in banking thus far. Technology is something no customer-facing banker ever saw or considered an important element for his ascension in banking hierarchy. It was relegated to the back office non-bankers to deal with the IT providers. But for the occasional upgrades, no banker ever worried about IT, much less thought of it as a piece of critical strategy. The IT departments took years to approve any enterprise software. Once a vendor was in, it was in for decades. No one would take a chance to even change the vendor. The premium was on ideas, and not on sweating back-office stuff. If we didn't even need to know how to create ppt slides, imagine the technology savvy of an average banker! Try telling any Wall Street CEO now, that technology is something that he can leave to his IT department! He would immediately suspect you as having designs on his role. As it were, the wall street CEO shelf-lives are so short, and that is for the best of them. Because it takes a super maniac to ascend to the throne of a wall street CEO, given the legions of maniacs that populate the ultra competitive industry. Most CEOs are made to depart for their predecessor's actions, as boards have to show that they respond to crises. Anyway, banking is such an arcane business where no one understands what really affects the bottomline, as a multitude of complex factors shape the business. Now with Blockchain - suddenly banking CEOs are required to not only understand but master technology.
At its core, blockchain is the email of money. It makes it cheaper and faster to transfer funds or digital assets or securities across geographies, by avoiding the duplication of ledgers and intermediaries entrusted to maintain the ledger. >That disrupts most of the traditional banking.
Also, blockchain is a record keeping system for secure and tamper-proof transactions which makes it possible for any parties to interact with each other based on their digital identities. >This disrupts even the sophisticated finance like derivatives trading, clearing and settlement etc.
Blockchain can enable smart contracts that self-execute based on a trigger condition. A couple can enter into a pre-nuptial agreement, say for example, that should X cheat, such an act of cheating to be agreed upon by predetermined criteria, Y gets to keep all of X's money. Voila! All gold-diggers have much to rejoice and those testosterone fuelled footballers and billionaires much to loathe blockchain for!
Why are Banks quick to react?
Banking has thrived as an industry due to its platform nature. You could not issue a cheque or transfer money to someone unless you are in the banking system. (That tells me Blockchain can now tackle black money too by tracking every expenditure trail) Nor could you borrow money unless someone like a bank vouched for your creditworthiness. Now that platform is under threat. There are already institutions such as Kiva and Loanbase doing microfinance in poor countries, not based on banking scores but on faith in social behaviour and humanity.
Technology is set to overtake banking institutions. So banks have been surprisingly nimble to act. Since it takes a maniac to get to the top, they wouldn't want to give up without a stiff fight - with all they have got! So here is what banks have done. Banks get that if a disruption were to happen in near term, it would more likely be another platform - before it takes the form of an ultimate disruption where banks would disappear altogether in their present form. Possibly! So, they are busy collaborating to create a would-be platform, trying to out-think ways that a disrupter could try to uproot them. Time will tell if such an experiment will succeed as money doesn't always equal brains or execution :P
Dollar investments: US$180 million investments is estimated to have gone into blockchain technology in 2015. Banks' investment in blockchain is expected to reach US$ 400 million by 2019 from US$75 million in 2015.
Innovation Labs: Citibank, UBS, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Bank, Deutsche Bank and State Street have set up innovation labs to study blockchain.
Pilot applications: The Royal Bank of Scotland, JPMoragn, and BNY Mellon have introduced in-house pilot applications to experiment.
Are you still working so late? mac os. Blockchain startups: Banks like Banco Santander, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Nomura and CIBC have invested in blockchain startups.
Banking consortium for Blockchain: A consortium of 42 banks, led by FinTech company R3CEV, is developing a framework for applying blockchain technology to markets. The consortium started on September 15, 2015, with nine firms. R3CEV announced its first distributed ledger experiment, involving 11 of its member banks, using Ethereum and Microsoft Azure's blockchain-as-a-service. The 11 member banks and R3 are connected on a private P2P distributed ledger, underpinned by Ethereum technology, and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure, the public cloud platform offering blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS). (I said earlier that in platforms, Winner takes all - Microsoft being a winner in OS and a technology leader for several decades has the capabilities to ace even blockchain and leverage its network effects. Microsoft entered bitcoin by collaborating with ConsenSys in Nov 2015, to introduce Blockchain as a Service on its Azure platform - an excellent step) These 11 banks in the successfully concluded R3 experiment include Barclays, BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo. Tokens were exchanged in North America, Europe and Asia from January 11 -15, on this private blockchain. The banks simulated exchanging value, represented by tokenized assets on the distributed ledger, without the need for a centralized third party, across the global private network. 'The tokens, or software code representing a theoretical asset, passed between nodes set up by the banks and R3 with no problems. The data about the tokens was intact and the validity of each transaction verified ‘instantaneously' by all nodes,' according to R3.
Patents: Bank of America has filed 15 blockchain patents and in the process of several more.
NASDAQ announced that its blockchain ledger technology, Linq, was able to successfully complete and record a private securities transaction.
Blockchain startup Chain documented the issuance of shares to a private investor using NASDAQ's blockchain-enabled technology.
IBM announced its open ledger project.
Digital Asset Holdings led by wall street veteran Blythe Masters has raised USD60 m investment from Goldman Sachs, JPM, Citi, BNP Paribas, IBM
We hosted several Blockchain debates at Fintech Storm last year, and I personally gave talks on Blockchain at University of Birmingham, Europe-India Conclave New Delhi 2015, and had an informal discussion with Reserve Bank of India.
New Platforms
Identity Management: There could be any number of new platforms based on identity management such as Unique ID , Driving Licenses, Subsidy distribution, public healthcare management, insurance claims and disbursements.
Ownership of title: Land and Vehicle registry, ownership of precious items such as diamonds, art and other collectibles
Authentication: Supply Chain management, e-commerce, online reviews etc
Education & Learning management: scoring of self-selected courses from a variety of sources so they can be included in considering the award of a degree
Inventory management
Internet of Things
Tax collection: A blockchain based tax system would reduce tax evaders and would control the black market economy
Micropayments: publications, online endoresements
Voting & Governance: Estonia recently experimented with e-residency platform where shareholders were allowed to electronically vote on NASDAQ Tallinn stock exchange using blockchain
An Australian political party has vowed to introduce blockchain based voting on bills
While much remains to be established by way of what is practical, the economy is already abuzz with blockchain activity. Its the new Gold Rush!
We have launched http://BlockchainStorm.co , our Global Series of Blockchain Conferences/ Workshops and Training for a variety of stake-holders like Developers/ Blockchain Founders/ Banks/Other Industries. We want to play a role in building the global eco-system in Blockchain and we are in the process of setting up an accelerator, a fund, a R&D lab.
London
We hosted the first ever Technical Workshops in London for Blockchain Devs on 5 Sep 2016 and 16 Sep 2016, and will host another on 17 Oct 2016 and more.
Look up all our upcoming events (as well as past events) at http://fintechstorm.eventbrite.com
We are launching our Blockchain Storm Series with Blockchain and Banking - Geneva on 30 Sep 2016
Fintech Storm Istanbul Summit 17 Nov 2016
Blockchain India Summit 6 December 2016, Shangri-La Hotel, New Delhi, India
Past events
See Fintech Storm - An Overview
We hosted many Blockchain Conferences and Roundtables in London in 2015 and 2016.
We hosted a Blockchain Symposium as part of the Fintech Storm India Summit 12-13 May 2016 in Mumbai at the statuesque St regis hotel. India Summit will focus on the banking & financial services landscape in India featuring NPCI, CEOs of future savvy banks, the regulator RBI, National Stock Exchange, National Securities Depository Limited, CDSL to explore what we can together achieve. http://fintechstormindia.com
India Financial Forum - 12 May 2016 featuring Bank CEOs, NPCI, Regulators, Policy makers, disrupters, startups
Blockchain Workshop – 13 May 2016
This is a special 3 hour Blockchain workshop hosted by Prof Marc Pilkington, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Burgundy, France and Arifa Khan, Blockchain Researcher & Founder of Fintech Storm.
Fintech Storm making the impossible possible – because, this is the era of democratisation of knowledge, talent and ability to create wealth!
Come join the fintech revolution!
Come enjoy this electrifying meet!
Register your place at http://europeindiaconclave.com
Yours truly giving a talk on Blockchain in New Delhi at Europe-India Conclave to a rapt audience! :P
We thank honorable Union Cabinet Minister Shri Nitin Gadkari for addressing the inaugural Europe-India Conclave 2015 in New Delhi.
The author Ms Arifa Khan is an avid blockchain researcher and a former investment banker with UBS & Credit Suisse. She is the Founder of Fintech Storm Series and architect of Europe-India Conclave launched in Dec 2015. Her ambitious initiative to create an eco system of Banking & Financial Services thinking about blockchain will soon take shape at Fintech Storm India Summit on 12-13 May 2016 inMumbai at the exquisite St Regis. She was recently featured in Femtech leaders and People & Management Magazine March 2016. Join the Revolution in India at http://fintechstormindia.com
Blockchain enthusiasts can meet her in London at Fintech Storm Blockchain debates.
