Thoughts, stories and ideas.
My thoughts on Palantir and the NHS. I do not hate Palantir. They employ some smart people, and they have done some good work in various places. They’re almost certainly worth engaging on projects across the UK public sector. I have written a lot of data connector in
In the 90s, the UN thought a lot about e-commerce and the Internet. Unlike most, they had a place to start from. (Warning: Hacked together reductionist allegorical history ahead.) That place was Telex, the successor to the telegram. And Telex is what glued together the corners of global commerce
Every agreement requires at least two utterances, an offer and an acceptance. That is the minimum requirement for a ‘meeting of minds’. It is not necessary that these utterances are directed towards a specific party, but they do need to have a known origin. Ex. I can make
Let’s try Medium 🙂 https://medium.com/@thomasbarker/sensible-services-or-two-cheers-for-microservices-85c65e3de622
Here is, in the author’s opinion, the simplest smart contract we can write in Solidity that has any use as an agreement or contract. contract MinimalContract { says(String something) public { return; }; } Which can work. For example… A: contract.says("I wish to buy sunscreen from $20.
A while ago I was in a group discussion about how to make gold a decentralised currency on the internet. Ultimately we couldn’t find a structure which accommodated decentralised issuance while remaining a fungible currency. Gold itself might be uniform, but the various forms it takes are merely
Like the much maligned GOTO statement, the private blockchain, as a means to data privacy or tighter governance, should be considered harmful. (Although like the GOTO statement, it might still sometimes be a lesser evil.) Why? Because the security properties of blockchains (and many other distributed data structures) rely on
This is a proposed blockchain powered online privacy standard. It came from discussions I had with Simon Deane-Johns [our lawyer at Zopa and a contributor to the Midata initiative(link is external) ]. The nicer legal wording is to his credit; any design errors are to mine. If you
(I am going to assume the reader is a software developer who’s interested in programmable blockchains. If you feel confused by smart contracts etc, go read Programmable Blockchains in Context by Vinay Gupta, who explains them far better than I do!) I would like to propose that blockchains
I gave a little talk on Ethereum at the Bitcoin Assembly at the Chaos Communication Conference in Hamburg this year. Mostly because I was surprised not to see it covered. Not sure about my delivery, but people asked questions afterwards so I guess I didn’t do to badly
For everyone who’s trying to work out how to pop a hash into the bitcoin blockchain. Written with the help of this article and a lot of browsing the bitcoinj forums.
Don’t be afraid And it’s not that frightening. The main reason to sit down and get a handle on your security is to stop worrying about it. Almost all attacks in real-life involve following a single weak seam through an organisation. Not zero-days , not
The title does have ‘P2P’ in it, but before talking about that, let’s take a few paragraphs about the way the “old fashioned” mainstream does things. For example, take a typical US home loan. Having decided to take a home equity loan to finance
I’m now published in Computing & Law magazine. My article is Payments Information in the Real World: Peering through a Broken Text File – essentially a long whine about the state of global wire transfer networks.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Zopa a long time ago. I still hold a sizeable [to me] number of shares. There are many start-up financing platforms styling themselves as “social lending”, “p2p lending” and so on. Always centred around an online loans exchange, some