Hadera Hashgraph launches mainnet, hopes to compete with global business networks

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 05:00:00 -0700

Hedera Hashgraph, an electronic public ledger developed for corporate use, launched its mainnet beta today, allowing developers to create an account and build decentralized applications (dApps) for it.

The distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a direct competitor to blockchain distributed ledgers such as Ethereum and Hyperledger, and claims it can outperform traditional financial and business networks.

“There is no direct equivalent to Hedera Hashgraph today,” said Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Hadera is potentially competing with public networks and all the enterprise DLT frameworks (such as Hyperledger Fabric & Sawtooth, R3 Corda, and others) and their commercial providers, which include AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.

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Why blockchain-based voting could threaten democracy

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 03:00:00 -0700

Public tests of blockchain-based mobile voting are growing.

Even as there’s been an uptick in pilot projects, security experts warn that blockchain-based mobile voting technology is innately insecure and potentially a danger to democracy through “wholesale fraud” or “manipulation tactics.”

The topic of election security has been in the spotlight recently after Congress held classified briefings on U.S. cyber infrastructure to identify and defend against threats to the election system, especially after Russian interference was uncovered in the 2016 Presidential election.

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Researchers to launch intentionally ‘vulnerable’ blockchain at Black Hat

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 14:06:00 -0700

Hoping to raise awareness about blockchain vulnerabilities, cybersecurity firm  Kudelski Security next week plans to launch the industry’s first “purposefully vulnerable” blockchain – and will demo it at next month’s Black Hat conference.

Kudelski Security’s FumbleChain project is aimed at highlighting vulnerabilities in blockchain ecosystems, according to Nathan Hamiel, head of cybersecurity research at Kudelski.

The flawed blockchain ledger is written in Python 3.0, making it easy for anyone to read and modify its source code, and it’s modular – allowing users to hack and add new challenges to promote continuous learning.

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The top 8 problems with blockchain

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2019 03:00:00 -0700

While blockchain holds tremendous potential for creating new financial, supply chain and digital identity systems, it’s often erroneously seen as a panacea for business problems.

The myriad of pilots and proofs of concept by large corporations and government agencies are showing real promise, but those projects don’t always lead to obvious business cases that justify doing something differently. Sometimes a tried and true technology like a relational database can perform the task much more efficiently than a distributed ledger based on peer-to-peer technology that will require complex governance and rules.

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(Insider Story)

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