Bitcoin Archives - Follow My Vote

What’s In Store For Blockchain In 2017?

Will Long — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 20:35:15 +0000

Blockchain technology is the backbone of Bitcoin. But since its inception in 2009, the technology has grown to support many use cases and projects around the world.

2017 will be a big year for blockchain. In this blog post, we cover the top areas of the blockchain industry and what we can expect for blockchain in 2017.

There are 7 Banks that want to go live with blockchain in 2017.

A recent CoinDesk article reveals that 7 major European banks are partnering on a new blockchain-based trade finance platform called the Digital Trade Chain (DTC).

They have a tentative plan to launch in Q3-Q4 of 2017.

Those backing the platform’s development are looking to establish a secure place to manage open account trade transactions for both domestic and international commerce. DTC utilizes a permissioned ledger, with authorized parties allowed to submit transactions on the platform.

Open account trade transactions involve products being shipped before the actual payment is due, meaning that trust among the transaction’s parties is imperative. With DTC, those plugged into the system will be able to track the progression of those transactions, from initiation to settlement.

Thus far, the banks involved – KBC, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit – have signed a memorandum of understanding that lays out the basic groundwork for future development. That said, the banks are looking to launch DTC sometime in 2017, with an eye to building support in markets like France, Germany and the UK.

Conferences involving blockchain in 2017

A conference that caught our eye recently is the MIT Technology Review Conference: The Business of Blockchain.

The event will be held at the MIT Media Lab on April 18, 2017. The purpose of the one-day conference is “to explore the opportunities and challenges associated with public digital ledgers, or blockchains.”

Blockchains have the power to create entirely new kinds of businesses and more people are starting to realize this everyday.

Blockchain is still relatively new. The industry is still in its infancy. We can expect a variety of new use cases to be introduced in 2017.

Bitcoin in 2017

Bitcoin is the largest and most well know blockchain project. It is currently traded all around the world and more businesses are beginning to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.

In addition to growth and adoption, Bitcoin will focus on security and scalability. The DAO hack demonstrated the need for advanced security protocols for all blockchain projects. Scalability is also an issue. “Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 3.3 tps (7 tps theoretical) due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB. Scalability will remain the holy grail of blockchain technology.”

Ethereum in 2017

Many people believe the public blockchain with the most attainable and impactful scalability roadmap is Ethereum.

Here are some of the Ethereum projects to look out for:

Infura is an enterprise-grade Ethereum-based blockchain infrastructure being used in IoT, and in conjunction with the public Ethereum blockchain and Inter Planetary File System (IPFS). Developers interface with Infura via Web3/RPC.

MetaMask is a bridge that allows you to visit the distributed web of tomorrow in your browser today. It allows you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser without running a full Ethereum node.

BlockApps is an enterprise-grade Ethereum-based blockchain infrastructure solution used in banking, payments, insurance, supply chain and others. BlockApps is designed to provide a permissioned Ethereum environment which easily operates at scale, allowing applications to handle a high volume of transactions per second. Developers can build interfaces with their permissioned blockchain using a REST API.

Steemit in 2017

Steemit.com is the world’s fastest growing decentralized social media platform. Steemit connects to a robust blockchain database called Steem. This blockchain database distributes rewards in cryptocurrency to the users who bring the best content (blogs, comments, videos etc.) to the Steemit site.

On January 17th, 2017 Steemit.com was featured on Forbes.com. Author, Roger Aitken covered the 2017 comprehensive roadmap for Steemit.com.

The big news surrounds the Steemit.com migration to Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest hosting provider. Steemit has racked up over 120,000 registered users in around 6 months and they need to be able to handle more traffic as the platform grows.

Steemit Co-founder & CEO, Ned Scott is quoted several times throughout the article:

“2017 will be our banner year and the community will see a ton of upgrades from now until the end of March. Migrating hosting to reputable third parties allows us to focus all of our time and attention on development of the site, software, and community – not on scaling or maintaining servers or hosting infrastructure.”

Follow My Vote in 2017

Follow My Vote continues to pioneer end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting software in 2017. See our Github repo for updates on our software.

In 2016, we managed to get featured on Forbes.com and successfully integrated our stake-weighted voting software with the BitShares blockchain.

It’s important to note that, when designing our stake-weighted voting system’s architecture, we designed it in such a way to ensure that our blockchain voting software was portable from one blockchain to another. (contact us if you are interested in a custom blockchain voting solution)

2016 was filled with momentous achievements for Follow My Vote. Here you can see we reached out to and networked with some of the top technology leaders and politicians. (Gary Johnson & John McAfee featured)

We anticipate that 2017 will be filled with many Follow My Vote software releases and partnerships, in an effort to bring end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting to the world.

Learn about our stake weighted blockchain voting software.

Learn about our 1 person 1 vote blockchain voting software.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

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Follow My Vote Featured On The Huffington Post!

Will Long — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 20:13:02 +0000

Once again, Follow My Vote has been featured in the news! We are excited to announce that the Huffington Post has featured Follow My Vote in an article about blockchain technology.

Huffington Post writer, Pradeep Aradhya wrote a fantastic and informative article in the business section on April 1st, 2016. The article covered the blockchain and some of the industry pioneers. Aradhya included an infographic about how a blockchain works, as well as some information on how current banks are trying to use these distributed databases.

The dedication and hard work of all the Follow My Vote team members is starting to pay off. We have an immense knowledge of the coding languages and security methods necessary to work with and build blockchains. We are now seeing the fruition of our effort, as well as recognition of well known publications.

Here is what Aradhya included about Follow My Vote in his Huffington Post article:

One of the most interesting applications of Blockchain is in the election business. FollowMyVote is running a parallel presidential election built on an online voting system that is expected to eliminate all illegitimacy in the vote counting process. Using a webcam and a government-issued ID, voters can remotely and securely log in and vote for their desired candidates. After they’ve selected their candidates, they can use their unique Voter ID to quite literally open the ballot box, locate their vote, and check that it is both present and correct. Additionally, voters can then watch the election progress in real time as votes are cast.

What’s more, Follow My Vote’s platform allows for an indecisive voter to return to the system and switch his or her votes at any time before the election deadline closes.

Aradhya also included our animated video, which helps explain how, and more importantly why we are building end to end verifiable (E2E V) blockchain voting software.

To see other articles Follow My Vote has been featured in, visit our Press Page.

Source: The Huffington Post

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

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Campaign Finance Going Digital In Virginia?

tylerm93 — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:05:51 +0000

Campaign finance could be going digital in Virginia. The Virginia General Assembly recently introduced a bill titled HB 687 on campaign finance reform. The bill would allow digital currency as a form of monetary contribution to campaigns. Making the leap into campaign finance would be a big win for digital currency.

So how exactly would a digital contribution work under HB 687? The value of the digital currency would be determined by its market value at the time of the transaction. So any increase to the market value afterwards would have to be reported as interest on the campaigns finance report. One catch to all of this, is that to spend any of the digital currency, it must first be sold on the market, and then have those funds be placed back into dollars. Only then can those dollars be spent.

“Campaign finance; digital currency as an accepted form of contribution. Provides for the acceptance of contributions to a candidate, campaign committee, or political committee in the form of digital currency. The bill provides that such contributions shall be valued by the market value of the digital currency at the time the contribution is received and requires that any increase in the value of the digital currency while in the committee’s designated depository be reported as interest on a campaign finance report. The bill also requires the treasurer for any campaign or political committee to sell any digital currency contributed to it and deposit the proceeds from the sale into the designated depository before the funds may be expended. The bill defines digital currency as money represented by digital information that is stored, spent, and transferred electronically as part of a financial transaction. All provisions governing the acceptance and reporting of contributions apply to contributions in the form of digital currency.”

– HB 687, Virginia’s Legislative Information System

On a national level, digital currency has been making its way into campaigns such as Rand Paul’s. Paul is one of the first presidential candidates to accept donations in bitcoin. The FEC says that, under US federal election laws, the digital currency must first be sold on the market and the proceeds are placed back in the campaign depository before being spent. Essentially the same as Virginia’s HB 687. On top of this, the FEC has capped the contribution value of digital currency at $100. Federal election laws apply to the U.S. House, Senate and Presidency.

Needless to say, donating digital currency is still in its political infancy. There is still a large amount of red tape that is causing widespread adoption to sputter. While this is a step in the right direction for allowing digital currency into campaign finance, eventually allowing digital currency to be spent without conversion is the ultimate goal.

About the author: Tyler Molihan is a Marketing Intern at Follow My Vote. He hopes to increase awareness about the benefits of online voting systems.

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Google Tries Their Own Voting System: A Liquid Democracy Experiment

Adam Ernest — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 22:00:42 +0000

Although not the only search engine in the world, Google is by far the largest and has expanded into many different areas of the web. Including their social media site, Google+ and acquiring Youtube, Google is an incredibly large force that won’t be reckoned with anytime soon. Google has recently tried their own hand at creating an online voting platform through their Google+ services that would encourage liquid democracy in a brand new way.

Abstract

This paper introduces Google Votes, an experiment in liquid democracy built on Google’s internal corporate Google+ social network. Liquid democracy decision-making systems can scale to cover large groups by enabling voters to delegate their votes to other voters. This approach is in contrast to direct democracy systems where voters vote directly on issues, and representative democracy systems where voters elect representatives to vote on issues for them. Liquid democracy systems can provide many of the benefits of both direct and representative democracy systems with few of the weaknesses. Thus far, high implementation complexity and infrastructure costs have prevented widespread adoption. Google Votes demonstrates how the use of social-networking technology can overcome these barriers and enable practical liquid democracy systems. The case-study of Google Votes usage at Google over a 3 year timeframe is included, as well as a framework for evaluating vote visibility called the “Golden Rule of Liquid Democracy”.

Introduction

Effective decision making is a challenge for any structured group. It can be time consuming, inefficient and frustrating since it depends on many different aspects of group dynamics (Postmes, Spears and Cihangir 2001). Democratic decision-making systems have great promise since 1) they can take input from many group members with diverse knowledge and experience, and 2) the generated decisions gain legitimacy from the democratic nature of the process improving chances for successful execution (Council of Europe 2008). Many decision-making systems take the name “democracy” and claim to follow ideas in accordance with the meaning of the original Greek word δημοκρατία, “rule of the people” (Liddell and Scott 1889). In practice, they often have low group engagement and only small sub-groups of people contribute ideas and decide among them (Noveck 2009; Serrano 2015).

This paper argues that liquid democracy is a particularly promising form for democratic decision-making systems and building liquid democracy systems on social-networking software is a practical approach. It presents the Google Votes system built on Google’s internal corporate Google+ social network. Google Votes is an experiment in applying liquid democracy to decision-making in the corporate environment. It was developed in 20% time (Schmidt and Rosenberg 2014) by a small group of Google engineers. The concepts related to the topic will be described next, followed by an overview of the system and the specific case study of 3 years usage at Google.

Liquid Democracy

Democratic voting systems generally employ a form of direct democracy where everyone votes directly, or representative democracy where a small set of representatives vote on behalf of the larger group (Ford 2002). Figure 1 gives a direct democracy example where voters (circles) vote (solid-head arrows) directly on issues (squares), and a representative democracy example where voters elect (open-head arrows) representatives (large circles) who vote on issues.

Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network: tdcommons.org

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Blockchain Potential

Adam Ernest — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 19:48:58 +0000

Most people by now are familiar with Bitcoin, the digital currency that is created using Blockchain technology. Although Bitcoin has had a very tumultuous start, investors and entrepreneurs are more fascinated with the potential capabilities that blockchain technology has outside of the Bitcoin currency. Many have discussed using it as a sort of watermark for the sale of copyrighted music and eventually, a means of online voting that would allow citizens to have a more direct influence on policy making. Check out this article that covers just how blockchain works in easy to understand language.

Talk to most people about Bitcoin and several things come to mind: a secretive inventor, illicit marketplaces and the failure of one of its largest exchanges. Not exactly the kind of images most entrepreneurs want to be associated with.

But it turns out that currency might not be the most exciting thing to come out of the Bitcoin craze. Instead, it’s the technology that makes Bitcoin work, known as the blockchain, which will be truly revolutionary.

Before leaping ahead, a word on how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin, of course, is a digital currency that can be used like cash to pay for a growing number of goods and services. When someone uses Bitcoin to, say, buy a pizza, that transaction is recorded on a “block,” or a file of data. Once a block is full (determined by time — on average every 10 minutes — rather than quantity), the next block to be created incorporates computer code that refers to the preceding block — thereby building a permanent string of records known as the blockchain.
Read more at: forbes.com

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Pirate Party of Finland Sees Surge of Donations in Bitcoin

Will Long — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:32:36 +0000

If you have been paying attention to recent events concerning Follow My Vote, you know about our experience and success with the Pirate Party of Norway. We have been paying more attention to the Pirate Party and are excited to see the party doing well in other countries. Recently the Pirate Party of Finland has seen a spike in Bitcoin donations. We at Follow My Vote are very in tune with the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as we use the same technology to run and secure our revolutionary voting platform. Make sure you check out our blockchain technology page if you haven’t! We wish the Pirate Party of Finland all the best and encourage the use of innovative technologies like that of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

The Finnish Pirate Party, also known as Piraattipuolue in Finnish, ran in the Finnish Parliment elections on Sunday, April 19th, 2015. Bitcoin donations to the party have skyrocketed in the last month, exceeding over 10,000 Euros of BTC, more than the 4,000 Euros they received from all donation channels last year. This shows not only that the party is growing significantly, but also that Bitcoin is increasing in popularity within the party. The FPP’s platform focuses on liberty, privacy, transparency of government, and more social freedoms, all of which line up with the principles of Cryptocurrency.

Read the full article here.

NOTE: Follow My Vote is a non-partisan organization. This announcement should in no way, shape, or form serve as an endorsement for the Pirate Party by Follow My Vote.

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Bitcoin May Fail but the Blockchain is Here to Stay

Adam Ernest — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 20:11:00 +0000

Bitcoin may be a thing of the past but the blockchain is here to stay. Blockchain technology is posing as the new front runner for digital exchange, and not only with voting. When introduced, Bitcoin mining was something any coder or developer could easily do to make an extra buck. But as Bitcoin grew and matured the competition of mining new bitcoins into existence increased. Economies of scale kicked in and next thing we knew, you had to have a warehouse full of servers to compete. Now people are using more energy trying to mine than they end up earning in crypto-currency at the end of the day. While this is an issue for this specific crypto-currency, the technology behind it will still thrive. The blockchain is here to stay. There are multiple companies now, at home and overseas, that are utilizing this amazing transparent technology that with some tooling and testing might over turn paper voting and bring on a new era in digital voting.

Bitcoin could end up being the MySpace of cryptocurrency, but the underlying technology powering new payment methods is here to stay. That’s according to Brock Pierce, a tech entrepreneur with his eyes firmly fixed on cryptocurrencies.

“By having a baseline protocol that allows you to innovate around finance, a lot of interesting things can happen,” he says. The protocol Pierce is talking about is the blockchain — a public, transparent ledger that gives a chain of transactions that is secure and reliable.

“This protocol is going to democratise the global financial system,” Pierce explains to the audience at WIRED Retail. In South America and Africa the blockchain, be it through Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, has huge transformative potential.

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Inside Bitcoins Las Vegas

Will Long — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:23:39 +0000

Follow My Vote attended the Inside Bitcoins conference, which took place October 5th-7th in Las Vegas, Nevada, to network and listen to keynote speeches from industry leaders. Some of the more memorable speeches were from Dan Larimer, Patrick Byrne, and Bobby Lee.

Dan Larimer, founder of BitShares, gave a keynote speech called “Bitcoin and Beyond”. In his speech, Larimer highlighted reasons why delegated proof of stake is likely the future of blockchain transaction processing and why BitShares uses it, as opposed to proof of work (which Bitcoin is based on). He urged the Bitcoin community to persuade the major mining pools that control the network to pivot to the proof of stake model to allow for decentralization, as proof of work is a method of the past that has proven to lead to centralization of the network, the antithesis of what Bitcoin was meant to be in the first place.

Larimer also introduced BitUSD, a market asset issued within the BitSharesX Decentralized Exchange, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. By owning BitUSD, you can hold crypto-currency that is truly a currency and not equity. The price remains steady and does not experience the same volatile fluctuations that Bitcoin and other alt-coins experience. The same concept has been concept has been applied in countries such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which have pegged their countries’ currencies to the U.S. dollar, except now BitUSD changes the game as it is the first stable blockchain based currency. In fact, by holding BitUSD, you can actually gain 5-10% interest on the value of your BitUSD, which is better than the average savings account you’d get from your bank, Larimer explained.

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com gave his keynote titled “The Next Decentralized Frontier of Cryptosecurities,” during which he announced a partnership between Counterparty and Overstock. Byrne, an avid supporter of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, hopes to establish a Bitcoin based stock market. This “New Wall Street,” as some have called it, would take out the middle men from the stock exchanges and make it easier for startups and other companies to issue their own stock. Although some question the partnership, being that it is based on Bitcoin (a proof of work blockchain model), most see it’s further validation for the crypto-currency industry as a whole. Regardless of the camp you are in (proof of work vs. proof of stake), it’s good to know that they will carry the bulk of the load and pave the way through bureaucratic regulations for others to follow, like the first snow plow to hit the streets after a huge snow storm. Read more on the partnership here.

Bobby Lee, CEO of BTC China and an active board member of the Bitcoin Foundation, gave a speech on the tremendous rise of the Bitcoin industry. His speech was very fascinating as he brought a perspective that is synonymous with many Bitcoin advocates in China.

In addition to the keynote speeches at the Inside Bitcoins conference, outside of the auditoriums, companies sponsored booths to showcase their products and services as they relate to Bitcoin and the crypto-currency industry as a whole. There was even a Bitcoin ATM at one of the booths, which was fascinating to see in person. We also talked to several individuals and investors who were very excited to find out there is a company working on blockchain based voting that has the potential to revolutionize they way elections are being hosted today.

When it was all said and done, Follow My Vote created some serious buzz at the conference with respect to the online open-source voting platform we’ve been working to develop. Hopefully the connections we’ve made at Inside Bitcoins will bring us that much closer to free and fair elections here in the United States and abroad.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…

unless the whole world hears about it!

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