New gaming plaforms that utilise cryptocurrency coins as in game currency are on the rise. Games such as Axie Infinity and The Sandbox allow users buy and sell in game NFTs or tokens to other game players.
Tim Ferriss recently interviewed Balaji Srinivasan and it was an insanely good interview! They cover geo-politics, crypto, their intersection, among many, many other topics, futurist and otherwise.
You may have heard about the digital art NFT that sold for $69 million. NPR's The Indicator podcast has a good explainer episode on the sale of Beeple's Everyday Project which includes an interview with Beeple (aka Mike Winkelman).
The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance created a Bitcoin Electricity Consumption index, including a neat dashboard showing a mining map and comparing the consumption of electricity by the Bitcoin network with those of countries, and boiling all the kettles in the UK and the EU, among other comparisons.
The Verge have an interesting piece on the lack of standardisation of meta data in the music industry. Royalty money is being left on the table because of data errors and/or mismatches between the many meta data databases used by the numerous streaming services, especially when dealing with collaboration tracks.
Brave is a new browser built on Chromium that claims 2x to 8x speed increases over regular browsers. It also focusses on ad tracking privacy by blocking all third party ad tracking. On top of this, using the Basic Attention Token, users can opt-in to Brave Rewards allowing for the collection and donation of BATs directly with content creators and publishers. You can earn yourself some BATs now on Coinbase Earn by watching a few videos about Brave.
At AWS re:Invent this week Amazon launch a rake of new services, including a managed blockchain and quantum ledger database (QLDB) service. Their blockchain offers a managed scaleable service and the QLDB ledger offers an append only immutable ledger with a central trust authority. I think these services will be huge for companies that don't want to deploy and manage their own blockchain, or that don't necessarily need the distributed part of DLT.
Before Satoshi and Bitcoin, researchers Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta invented the blockchain concept in a paper published in the Journal of Cryptography in 1991. They then went on to found a company called Surety which provided timestamping and digital seal services for digital documents.
KODAK One have completed a trial with stock image service Lobster to monitor and report on the use of 10,000 images from the Lobster libarary across the web for a two week period. The trial demonstrates the successful implementation of three services from KODAK One's image rights management platform, their image recognition system, web crawlers and post-licencing services. They plan to continue the trial by reigstering all images in the Lobster library on the KODAK One blockchain.
Program The Blockchain is a site with a range of blockchain code tutorials. Topics on the site range from blockchain basics to tutorials on how to write an ERC20 Token contract and createing state channels.
