on ICO price and media news

Considering the whole ICO wild west, the appearance and spread of the news or false news are much more critical than in the traditional industry. The whole ICO and token concept based on the idea that the products are actually not ready, they only exist as a whitepaper at the beginning, and perhaps something will be realized perhaps nothing. For this reason the appearance of the different news can influence the price in a enormous way. Surprisingly, informative news, like a new milestone has been successfully reached are usually too technical to really make a huge influence. However such a news that a given company made a successful partnership with a big company or a potential customer make the prices sky-rocketing. The situation can be even worse if the news are actually fake and are created only to manipulate prices. As the whole area pretty much a wild-west, it is questionable what can be done against such a negative manipulation.    

Ethereum Blockchain Business Networks

Solidity programming is actually not a simple task. I mean it is certainly not complicated to use the language itself, however to develop programs on an industrial scale, including both performance and hacking resistance is certainly an issue. An approach might be in certain situations not to use the whole language, only a certain set of it or certain abstractions as building blocks. 

On idea might be to use something similar to the model specific languages of hyperledger to develop a so called consortium blockchain network. In such examples not everything is programmed from scratch, instead high level concepts are defined like participants, assets and transactions. They function as building blocks to deliver a lot of different possible applications. If we suppose that the building blocks have a high quality, than the whole application will have a good general quality and the whole development process will be less risky. 

Certainly, it is an open question if the same or similar conceptional model that is working in a consortium blockchain context can be useful in a public blockchain use-case. 

Notes on agile methodologies at Blockchain development

Agile, Scrum, DevOps, Lean development. These technologies are cool and they certainly offer advantages in a lot of different circumstances. However as soon as it is about Blockchain development these methodologies should be used with extreme caution, or rather not used at all. The problem is that public Blockchains has got a special characteristic, they work rather as trustware, in which practically different cryptographical and collaboration protocols are implemented. On the top, both smart contracts and classical protocols are immutable, meaning that change usually means hard-fork. However to realize a hard fork is actually not so easy, practically it requires the support from the whole community and all the miners, so it is an option only in a very few exceptional situation. As a consequence, developing on a public blockchain requires rather the conservative methodologies, like waterfall or V model, with a lot of unit testing, penetration testing code and formal verification.

Microsoft, abandoning the ship

Microsoft used to be a pretty ambitions company that tried to compete with the whole IT world almost in every possibly segment. The strategy was actually, simple they produced a lot of different products and services that were sometimes probably not best in the world but with two simple strategies it was despite possible to compete with the rest of the world:

1. Technology synergy: the products were pretty much compatible with each other and mostly incompatible with the rest of the world. It implied that at selling one state of the art service, a couple of related perhaps not so state of the art products were automatically sold as well. 

2. Community: there was a relative big and convinced community, that helped both at bootstrapping the new products and knowledge based and at pushing the sales further even with products that were perhaps not the best on the world. 

However, this strategy has been pretty strongly changing for 3-4 years; the new strategy seems to have the following properties:

1. instead of a one big closed technology block, in which services are compatible with each other and incompatible with the rest of the world, the direction seems to achieve maximum compatibility with each service with the rest of the world, including competitors products. 

2. an implication of giving up the technology synergy that only world class services and products can survive, and well actually it seems Microsoft tries to cancel 80% of its technology portfolio. There seem to be 2 main focus of the strategy Azure and SQL server, and perhaps 2-3 elements that will somehow further exist like Windows but only at some client applications, Office in an online form and so on. I seems all the other products are actively being cancelled, like classical development directions (.NET, C#, classical Visual Studio or TFS), Windows as a server solution or the whole mobile direction.       

3. with the aggressive and fast cancelling of the existing product lines both the community and the existing customer base seem to vanish. And I think this advantage can not really be reached back again, even with slogans like Microsoft loves Linux, there is not much chance that the old fashioned Linux customers or community members change to Microsoft. 

4. the new and innovative direction seem to be pretty much questionable:

- The future of quantum computing is pretty questionable, on the one hand it is not sure how fast an industry scale quantum computing can be reached. On the other hand, companies like IBM have got ten years of first movers advantage in the field, like having put onto the market online collaboration platform for quantum computing. 

- Virtual reality and augmented reality will have the first big success in two fields: gaming and porno. Due to market success, both the hardware will be cheaper and a big developer community will appear. As a consequence, Microsoft will have an over-prized hardware with a developer platform, that is used only by a couple of developers. 

-  For artificial intelligence there is a pretty strong competition on the market, like IBM Watson, or Google Deepmind. I think the field has got again a high competition and it is highly technical, so Microsoft surely needs to produce more than some fancy chatbots. 

5. on the top, there are some signs that are rather annoying:

- focusing and communicating too much about the internal reorganization is always a sign that the company did not really succeeded to do anything powerful with the products or markets. 

- having over-positive communication and a lot of emotional elements in the communication, like story telling is usually a good way to put the stock price high (and sell before the price collapse).

As a result, the question is raised naturally: Will Microsoft go down ?  

  

On the legalization of the cryptomarket

Continues efforts for putting the whole crypto market into the existing legal framework is doomed to fail. The reason is pretty simple they are just simply scratching the surface of the whole phenomena, instead of trying to understand the fundamental building blocks of the crypoeconomics and adapt the whole legal system accordingly. Actually the legal system is about hundred years old, having no chance to deal with the changed digital environment, As a result the legal definition still struggles defining what is exactly a cryptocurrency or Bitcoin and in the meantime totally new phenomena, like ICO has reached a billion dollar market share. However the real question is what is appearing on the horizon of the Blockchain innovations. It is something for that is not payed attention at all, implying that regulators will be again one or two steps behind as soon as the new phenomena scales up.    

Questions on DAI (Decentralized Artificial Intelligence)

Considering the hype around blockchain and the different decentralized technologies and decentralized business models, the question raises slowly if there is a way to create artificial intelligence on a decentralized way. Certainly, it is a question how exactly an artificial intelligence algorithm can be made to decentralized. 

- Should it be somehow similar to the autunomous agents ? 

- Is it possible to capitalize the blockchain or the distributes storage as well ?

- What should be the communication interface around the nodes ?

- Which functionality should be realized by the nodes themself ?

- Is it possible to create a real decentralized algorithm ?

- It it possible to create a model somehow the same way as with decentralized storage or computation ?

- Like with SWARM, or GOLEM ?

The new de facto reserve crypto-currency is Bitcoin

Perhaps, it funny to put this thing in this way, but actually the new reserve currency of the crypto world is the Bitcoin. Certainly, it does not really work the same way as a classical reserve currency like the US Dollar, mostly because of the reason that the cryptowold has got a different logic, as an example independent from the nation state by default. However, if someone wants to exchange between fiat and crypto than the first interface money is actually Bitcoin. On the other hand Bitcoin has got actually the biggest mainstream adaptation on the world, implying the most liquidity and probably price stability (not necessarily in comparing with fiat currencies but comparing with other cryptocurrencies). 

Notes on the economics of online education

Considering the current trends of inline education and the different competing platform, that do not only compete in the IT technology but with the content as well, we can basically conclude that the education will become free of charge. It is a pretty good question which impact does it have to the existing classical and centralized educational institutes, like universities or high schools. Which are the topics or know-how that still can be delivered by these institute, and for which topics is it possible to get higher prize as free of charge.   

Tokenization and gamification

Surprisingly, Blockchain or tokenization and gamification do not seem to be two totally different concepts. The major idea of gamification is on the other hand the "game" itself, on the other hand some economic reward that is usually manifested in community points, badges, new roles and so on. The next logical step is to realize this economic reward directly with trade-able tokens that can not only collected or gained for some community activities but actually traded or perhaps even sold for real or crypto money.   

The idea might work well in fields where the gamification is strong by design. As gamification tokens might mean a special area in the whole cryptoeconomic and probably they do not carry such a huge burden of legislation risk, it might be a good idea not just to try out gamification-tokenization areas one by one, but to create general token-as-a-service platforms.  

Notes on general coin services - token as a service

Considering the current gold rush for ICO-s and different tokens, there are a couple of services that do not necessarily provide services on their own, but rather concentrate on giving general services for other ICO-s. It is generally the question which are these services. The mostly needed service is not just general consulting but the token creation itself and something that is a "trusted" communication for the cryptocurrency economy to convince everybody that the project is "kosher". Let we call such services as token-as-a-service.

However exactly providing these functionalities has some negative effects. A successfully project is usually much more than simply a token sale. They focus instead on creating fully decentralized platforms on which programming the token itself is usually just the first and easiest step. So, if a company or team can not succeed in even the easiest step, than they will probably fail to deliver anything at all at the end of the development plan. It means indirectly, that such a general coin services will attract all the scammers from the market. 

On the other hand, providing token as a service can attract multiplicative legal risk, as the company providing different tokens can be made responsible for each tokens. As the general token sale is basically a wild west at the moment, meaning different legislation at each country that is changing day by day, providing a token-as-a-service can a legal nightmare.

It is a general further question if such a services should be provided in a centralized way, or there is a possibility to do it completely decentralized.