David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Defiant John McAfee – Disruption For The Sake Of Evolution

Computer scientist and cybersecurity mogul is an ardent critic of government administration and traditional elites and not afraid to speak out, he broadcasts his values, opinions, and feelings on a daily basis on his Twitter feed. He is avidly supportive of the crypto/blockchain revolution and staunchly advocates the use of crypto and blockchain technology. McAfee fervently implores society to “wake up” and be mindful of the control and interference of government institutions and big tech. 

Taking his standpoint further John McAfee recently tweeted that people must decide on Blockchain, as it is a technology of the people and for the people. He wrote, “Do we bow to the corrupt we are trying to escape, or do we do the right thing for our species”  

McAfee and many more who share his stance believe that the industry must remain in the hands of the common people, and should not ever be in the control of the administration. Advocates of distributed decentralized ledgers have constantly stated that the blockchain could completely liberate society from the clutches of the government and assist us in taking control of our lives. 

McAfee also stated,  
“From 1920 until 1933 alcohol was prohibited in America. The prohibition was abandoned because no one stopped drinking. World governments are close to prohibiting crypto. They can expect the same result.”

John McAfee’s New DEX

John McAfee, an “on the run”  US presidential candidate 2020 among many other things has just launched his very own decentralized exchange (DEX) that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform requires no name, no documents, no email, and no bank info. So it’s basically doing without the widely used know your customer (KYC) policy. This is reported to be all set to disrupt the industry.

Also, according to reports, nothing on the McAfee DEX will be monitored by any kind of authoritative body and there will be no restrictions, no complex compliance procedures, and no listing fees either. The platform will charge a trading fee which will be minimal. 

Image credit news.u.today

In addition, he announced that DEX would have shared liquidity, which means that all the portals would have access to all maker/taker information coming through from every other portal on the platform and the McAfee DEX portal.

McAfee’s approach has a unique element. It’s offering the creation of portals, or copies of the DEX, with access points to the trading smart contracts. This way, the DEX will be theoretically accessible from multiple hosts and locations – hence censorship-free.

McAfee has been quite vocal that he dislikes the concept of the traditional, centralized financial system as he believes they are at risk of shutting down at any given moment by regulators thus leaving customers high and dry. Alternatively, decentralized platforms cannot be closed down just by anyone due to their intrinsic architecture as they are not controlled by any single party.   

Obviously, John McAfee’s moves and activities have been targeted by the United States government. McAfee had constantly claimed he’s been targeted for being truthful and his criticism of the present government which he aspires to take over from.

The Beta version of the decentralized cryptocurrency exchange has already been launched. So if he had bothered about the threat of the SEC, he wouldn’t have launched it in the first place. But to give his followers the assurance that his mission can’t be jeopardized by SEC, he shared a tweet for better clarification.

In the tweet, McAfee was optimistic that SEC will move to shut down Mcafeedex.com, but the technology that controls the system will make it an impossible mission.

He is still in hot pursuit and wanted by quite a few American agencies for criminal charges such as tax evasion and money laundering. He has also claimed that the CIA is after him which has forced him to keep shifting his bases, last known to be living on a boat in international waters.  Many of his followers are asking him if he is still running for POTUS. He had this to say… 

McAfee is still resolute about his far-fetched prediction of $1 million for Bitcoin by Dec. 31st, 2020, despite the criticisms and time frame left. He also publically stated back in 2017, he would eat his manhood on national television if Bitcoin didn’t reach his prediction which he says is not wishful thinking but an objective reality. There is almost a cult following holding him to his bet and a website has been set up counting down the time. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for either Bitcoin to reach $1 million or the “McAfee Show” carrying out his declaration which I’m sure will top ratings. (humor)
 

David Ogden 

A Crypto/Blockchain enthusiast and a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals. 

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Top 5 Pain Points of Companies and How Blockchain Can Solve Them

                               

However, it’s very challenging to manage new implementations of technology in a cost-effective way. IT solutions implemented incorrectly might be needlessly complex, and might be too transformative, requiring substantial retraining of employees in the organization. By harnessing technology appropriately, your organization can gain a competitive advantage – but you do need a roadmap to prevent you from becoming lost in the jungle of solutions. Blockchain technologies are currently becoming a hot topic for organizations, and I’d like to help provide this blockchain roadmap for companies out there.

5 Common Pain Points Companies Face

Trust Is Expensive Which Makes Collaboration Hard

There are obvious benefits when two organizations collaborate effectively. Many organizations form consortiums to leverage mutually beneficial ways to collaborate. Naturally, the challenge always comes down to trust. Organizations are run by groups of people, and groups of people don’t trust each other readily. Companies – even the ones who are in decade-long partnerships – may have competing interests and differing agendas. Who owns the servers that the shared system uses? Who has access to the cloud account that runs the apps? What happens when one organization wants to leave the consortium? How are decisions made between separate entities?

Data Jealousy Leads to Less Valuable Data

In 2017, the Economist proclaimed that data is more valuable than oil. Ginny Rometty of IBM declared it a ‘natural resource.’ The biggest and most powerful companies on our planet (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.) own the most data. Unfortunately, this mindset has led some companies into the rabbit hole of ‘data jealousy.’ This is the practice of refusing to share data, even with partnering companies. Big Data is only valuable if it’s big enough, and most companies only own data from “their point of view.” They struggle to leverage their data effectively because they only have access to the limited dataset they produce.

This is, of course, another systems issue. Companies that try to share data with each other on regular centralized systems come directly face to face with the questions: Who owns the actual data? Who can access the data and how frequently? How can I be sure that no one in my partner company tampered with the data? How can I be sure that my own data is accessed on a ‘need to know’ basis? The inability to answer these questions has led to investments in big data and analytics that do not show an ROI to an organization.

Reliance on Physical Documents Makes Audits Slow and Expensive

Most companies today still heavily rely on physical documents to ensure their business runs smoothly. This causes all kinds of headaches, especially during audits. It’s easy to digitize the documents. The challenge is keeping sensitive digital information secure. Since digital documents are easy to tamper with, they often cannot be relied upon for audits. This makes the audit process tedious and costly. During an audit, each division has competing interests with other divisions. Every division wants to pass the audit, even if it means another division fails. This is why we can’t use centralized systems’ digital documents as a basis for audit – they can be tampered with, and even server logs can be tampered by the IT division.

Automation Between Separate Companies Is Hard to Execute Fairly

While many companies seek to automate their operations, the challenge becomes ensuring that automation between companies is completed in a fair manner. For example, if two companies are partnering and have a business process automation solution in place to manage their collaboration, which company gets to own the server that runs the solution? No matter how well designed the centralized system is, the company that owns the server will have more control over the initiative. Even if you have a system that is really well-programmed, a server owner can still – literally – pull the plug on the automation.

Disaster Recovery and High Availability Systems Get Really Complicated and Pricey

Here’s how you create an Enterprise system these days: Maintain production uptime by adding a High Availability (HA) server. Maintain a failover system between Prod and HA. To ensure disaster preparedness, find another data center far away and put a server in there to act as a DRC. In case of further paranoia, get the DRC site an HA server as well. What about ‘putting it on the cloud’? Behind every cloud, there are computers too. Enterprise infrastructure is very familiar with declarations of ‘down for maintenance’ from every brand-name cloud. So you still set up DRCs or HA servers that interlink multiple cloud infras, just to make sure the business does not lose money from the downtime.

Companies today must maintain high availability of their IT systems. They must also ensure proper disaster recovery processes are in place. Unfortunately, these tools are continuing to rise in cost, which makes it hard for companies to stay profitable. Although technologies have become cheaper, customer expectations have become sky-high for constant access to apps and services, and are continuously increasing. This creates more demand for high-availability and DRC – not less. Even as companies shift towards cloud services, these enterprise data services can still become cost-prohibitive. Lower margin businesses are going to be priced out first.

How Blockchain Technology Helps Enterprise IT

Blockchain Enables Trusted Partnerships

The biggest challenge when creating systems of collaboration in a business consortium or partnership revolves around ensuring fairness between the parties. A blockchain can be used to ensure that each partner in the collaboration has control of the system – since each partner has a node of their own. If one partner tries to change the data in his or her node, the other nodes will immediately ostracize that node and ‘heal’ the data. Rather than having every partner put absolute trust to the company that runs the system, each partner can be secure in the understanding that its partners cannot tamper with decisions, data, or control.

Blockchains Enable Smaller Companies to Benefit From Big Data

Instead of small companies being stuck with their small silos of data, they can combine their data with other companies through the use of a blockchain, while maintaining the sovereignty of their data and their customers’ data. This enables more companies to access big data analytics instead of only the largest companies benefiting.

Blockchain Eliminates the Need For Physical Documents

Currently, it’s really hard to keep digital documents secure and safe. This forces many companies to keep paper records which are notoriously clumsy to work with. Imagine how much time is wasted trying to reconcile data across piles of paper? Time wasted is money wasted. Thankfully blockchains increase the ability to keep digital documents secure, which reduces the need to maintain physical paper documents for audit purposes or otherwise. This enables companies who leverage blockchains can reduce the time and money required to complete audits which will save money.

Blockchain Enables Business Process Automation With Smart Contracts

One of the most powerful concepts that blockchains enable is the use of smart contracts. Smart contracts are software contracts that execute predefined logic based on the parameters coded into the system. In other words, you can replace many business processes with software. For example, instead of hiring a team to handle contracts and procurement, you could run smart contracts that enforce the same procedures more effectively at a lower cost.

Some blockchain technologies (e.g., Nxt) use ‘smart transactions’ instead of smart contracts. Unlike smart contracts, which embed code inside the blockchain every time, smart transactions put the code inside the node that runs it, while referring to and using process templates inside the blockchain. This is less prone to coding errors and allows easier future tweaking of the code in Enterprise environments.

Other blockchains use different ways to ensure this type of flexibility, which is important since business processes in Enterprise environments constantly change. You need to be able to revise code you’ve deployed, in an agile fashion, quickly. This same concept can be more broadly applied to any business function that relies on multiparty business logic. Here’s a cheat code: Automation between parties enables better business SLAs, and blockchain enables automation between parties.

Blockchain Can Improve Data and Infrastructure Resilience

Traditional network architectures are heavily reliant on high availability & DRC servers to make sure the network data stays in sync. If there is a disaster scenario where one node is compromised, then the network is reliant on the backup server. This architecture is vulnerable to being compromised, whether by attacks, exploits, mismanagement, or disaster situations. In an equivalent blockchain architecture, there are two key advantages: data resilience and infrastructure resilience.

Data resilience is gained from the increase in total nodes on the network. Each node enforces consensus rules and prevents attackers from spreading false information. Infrastructure resilience is gained because each node can act as a backup server in case some nodes are taken down or compromised. This is a huge improvement over traditional infrastructure where the network might only rely on a single backup server. Lastly, the more nodes in a blockchain network, the more resilient the system is, whereas the opposite is true with traditional IT architecture.

Challenges When Implementing Blockchain Technology

While blockchains have the potential to improve the IT infrastructure of your organization, getting them integrating into your current systems requires some effort. Here are a few challenges to overcome when implementing a blockchain inside your organization.

Getting Buy-in From Upper Management

In order for any strategic initiative to be successful, the project leaders need to get support from management. Hiring a top tier blockchain consulting firm helps convince upper management that blockchain is worthy of company resources.

Ensuring Your Staff is Capable Of Supporting Blockchain

Whenever you’re considering adding new technology into your organization, it’s critical to consider your current staff. How advanced is your current IT staff? Do they have the time and ability to get skilled up?

Choosing the Right Blockchain For Your Needs

Not all blockchain projects are created equally, and each blockchain implementation makes necessary tradeoffs to maximize the intended use case. Be sure to define your needs upfront and ensure the correct blockchain is matched to your needs. Starting with a pilot project makes sense for many organizations.

Architecting the Right Solution Is Challenging

In order to maximize the chance of a successful implementation, it’s crucial that your organization gets the high-level architecture right. The best tool in the world is only effective if it’s used properly. If you don’t have expertise in house, consider hiring a consulting firm to guide the solution architecture.

What Should Be On-chain? What Should Stay Off-chain?

Blockchain technologies are incredible tools, but that doesn’t mean we should try to run our entire business on a blockchain. In fact, there are many use cases where a distributed ledger doesn’t make sense. Spend time upfront planning before moving into the implementation phase. It’s better to start small than trying to bite off more than you can chew.

Let’s Wrap Up

Blockchains are incredible tools, but they need to be approached with care. In order to maximize their benefit, consider hiring a reputable consulting firm to see if blockchain can help your business, and starting with a pilot project. As your team gets more comfortable with the technology, you can continue to build your footprint, letting the technology grow in value as you collaborate more.

Article Produced By
Ms. Pandu Sastrowardoyo

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden