It also gets interesting when you look at the different mining approaches. I believe that’s bitcoin’s achilles heel. Proof of work is very costly from an electricity standpoint. If you add in the miners electricity costs, the total cost per transaction is £40 an a transaction takes 4 – 10 hours to settle.

Real time push payments this is not… but then there are 3 emerging alternatives

1) Coloured coins.
2) App coins (Mastercoin)
3) Alt coins and Altchains (Ripple or Ethereum)

I’m a big fan of the idea of pre-mined if you can establish credibility in the organisation that pre-mines. You remove the cost of mining from the network, but keep all the benefits of the cryptography approach and cost reduction. You could pre-mine a whole lot of SWIFTcoin for example.

Project Stellar is a new approach to this, and their board screams credibility. I’m also liking redcoin…

The work happening now to make blockchain technologies more accessible is akin to the first compilers being built. Before we had to write in assembler code, now organisations like chain.io allow you to create solutions on the bitcoin blockchain much faster and with less expertise required.

I’m curious to see when we see the blockchain technology solving real challenges. Could a blockchain automate (more) paper because of its applicability to crypto law? Could it replace ageing core legacy systems? Could it provide an automatic audit trail, that is both transparent AND secure?