It was cryptocurrency, now smart contract.
Like it or not, know it or not, they are creeping into our everyday lives.
Scary? Not if you start learning about them now.
Accountants and lawyers had better watch out, you’d be out of jobs if you do not catch up with the trend in time.
Technology has taken over hard labour and WILL eventually also take over all routine professional work too.
Those were the days, about 40 years ago when agents of products or service stand to make a fortune by virtue of being the middleman linking supply and demand.
Nowadays almost everything and anything can be searched from the internet and deal directly with the source.
Next to be replaced will be third party financial and administrative services.
The future (for some now) will be a P2P world with blockchain and smart contracts technology.
What? You couldn’t be the least bothered and are only interested in making money?
No problem.
With both bitcoin and ether growing around 50% just in the last week or so, that works out to be almost double in US Dollar terms.
How’s that?
BitBeat: Microsoft to Offer Ethereum-Based Services on Azure
Bitcoin Latest Price: $298.65, up 1.4% (via CoinDesk)
Crossing Our Desk:
Microsoft was one of the first big companies to step into the bitcoin world. Now, it is taking a step into the Bitcoin 2.0 world.
The software giant has formed a partnership with Brooklyn-based Consensys, a startup that is building products and services for Ethereum, an alternative platform to bitcoin. Through the partnership, customers of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-based business service, will have access to tools that will allow them to experiment with and build products that can digitize and automate a plethora of operations, from securities trading to cross-border payments to corporate accounting, and offer them to their own customers.
There is “tremendous hunger” for these kinds of “blockchain” tools among the company’s customers, said Marley Gray, the director of tech strategy for financial services at Microsoft’s Times Square-based technology center, and the company was attracted to Ethereum by its flexibility.
Vitalik Buterin, a 21-year old programmer and writer, launched Ethereum this summer as a platform for what are called smart contracts. While bitcoin was designed with the single purpose of exchanging digital currency, Ethereum has broader goals. Ethereum’s mandate is to provide businesses with a platform on which products and services can be built that simplify various business functions and cut out the need for third parties. Anything that can be digitized, cryptocurrencies, derivatives trading, securities trading and settlement, even property titles, is a potential service on Ethereum.
Interest in these kinds of blockchain-based services is growing rapidly on Wall Street, which increasingly sees it as a way to streamline operations and potentially cut billions in costs from back-office operations. Firms like Symbiont, ItBit, and Overstock.com have built their own smart-contract platforms. A clutch of multinational banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse, and Barclays, joined a consortium formed by the firm R3 CEV, with the aim of establishing standards for blockchain technologies in financial services. Citigroup recently built its own cryptocurrencies, dubbed Citicoins, as a test of their capabilities.
Azure clients will have the ability to quickly build products or choose from existing templates to improve operations from accounting to logistics to cross-border payments and settlement. Firms that create products on Azure’s blockchain service can choose whether to release the product to the general public or control who has access to them.
Consensys is building and maintaining the service; Microsoft is essentially providing the distribution platform, which in this case is Azure. Consensys isn’t getting any revenue under the partnership, but plans to offer consulting and other high-end services to Azure clients.
Andrew Keys, director of communications at Consensys, said he essentially cold-called Microsoft with the idea. He sent an unsolicited email in September to Mr. Gray. To his surprise, Mr. Gray was very interested. Microsoft, which in late 2014 started accepting bitcoin in its XBox store, had blockchain technology “on our radar,” Mr. Gray said, and was getting asked about it from customers. The prospect of being able to offer a platform for smart contracts appealed to them, and was the main reason they went with an Ethereum-based product rather than a bitcoin-based one, he said.