Lifeboat Foundation

Blockchain Engine and Petrodvorets Watch Factory have introduced blockchain technology into the manufacturing process of Raketa watches, making Raketa one of the first companies in the world to record the production of physical goods in the blockchain.

Established by Peter the Great in 1721, Petrodvorets Watch Factory is one of Russia’s oldest businesses. After the Second World War, the factory produced watches under the brand name Pobeda until 1961, when production of the Raketa [Rocket] watches started, named in honor of the first flight into space by Yuri Gagarin.

In a bid to restructure the historical watch brand, the company entered a rebranding stage in 2009 under the direction of Russian, Swiss and French experts, with director Jacques von Polier heading the creative and design department.

Continue reading “Raketa Watches Trials Blockchain Technology to Fight Counterfeiting” »

Last week I dipped my toes in the waters of the Lifeboat blog and shared a link about blockchain technology. If you haven’t heard about blockchain technology yet, you can read about it here, here, here, here, here…you get the picture. Blockchain has tons of potential, and appears to also attract hype and money. All which goes to say, there has been a lot of buzz about its social and economic potential. But there is another aspect of blockchain that deserves some futurist exploration, which is that it signals we live in Postnormal Times.

Postnormal Times (PNT) is a fantastic foresight concept that I will focus on in my upcoming Lifeboat posts. There is an underlying theory to it; Ziauddin Sardar explains the entire idea and how it fits into futures studies. Ziauddin Sardar with John Sweeney have expanded the work into a futurist method called The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times. It’s well worth reading up on if you enjoy a futurist approach to your work and studies.

I’m still a beginner, but essentially the idea is that we are now in time is a period best characterized as “postnormal,” meaning that the usual ways of solving problems and making progress have stopped working. Our go-to responses, based on all the previously reliable ways of being in and understanding the world are becoming irrelevant and dysfunctional. The simplest way to introduce Sardar’s concept is the three C’s: complexity, chaos and contradictions. These are the key characteristics of postnormal times which I will be exploring in my posts about technology and humanity. I believe the PNT perspective leads to some useful observations about the direction of society over the next decades.

Back to my blockchain example: the Raketa watch company is implementing blockchain in manufacturing, which will protect inventory from counterfeiting. This development signals PNT because it speaks to the complexity of globalized financial and consumer markets. In this case, so intricate as to require a new, high-tech, largely automated and seemingly fail-proof technology. PNT is evident when previous methods of running a company are no longer sound. Enter blockchain to navigate this new business condition.

Continue reading “Blog Posts for Postnormal Times” »

“The state of New York just got another bitcoin company that can legally operate under the auspices of the state financial regulator’s guidelines.”

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Raketa will be one of the the first companies in the world to record the production of physical goods in the Blockchain.

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Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Watch live as hundreds of the world’s leading investors, entrepreneurs and innovators gather in New York to define the future of the way we do business.

In Bitcoin’s early years computer scientists and early adopters were running the show. Now, a new community of academics, entrepreneurs, and economists, are working with cryptocurrencies and blockchain to bring the technology to a new set of diverse applications.

From building peer-to-peer networks for secure data computation and storage to decentralized content management systems that give patients access to health-care records across hospital databases, blockchain and digital currencies are starting to rewrite the rules of the 21st century transaction.

Continue reading “Digital Currency Tech Will as Be Transformative as the Internet” »

“In an obscure corner of the internet, an anonymous person or persons published a math paper — the “Bitcoin white paper” — that solved a problem that had until then stumped computer scientists: how to create digital money without any trusted parties.”

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Wall Street banks are buzzing about blockchain.

Goldman Sachs says the technology “has the potential to redefine transactions” and can change “everything.”

JPMorgan last month announced it was launching a trial project with the blockchain startup led by its former executive, Blythe Masters. Her company, Digital Asset Holdings, has secured funding from Goldman, Citi, ICAP, and a boatload of other financial firms.

Continue reading “There is a ‘game changer’ technology on Wall Street and people keep confusing it with bitcoin” »

Anyone who has heard of Bitcoin knows that it is built on a mechanism called The Blockchain. Most of us who follow the topic are also aware that Bitcoin and the blockchain were unveiled—together—in a whitepaper by a mysterious developer, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

That was eight years ago. Bitcoin is still the granddaddy of all blockchain-based networks, and most of the others deal with alternate payment coins of one type or another. Since Bitcoin is king, the others are collectively referred to as ‘Altcoins’.

But the blockchain can power so much more than coins and payments. And so—as you might expect—investors are paying lots of attention to blockchain startups or blockchain integration into existing services. Not just for payments, but for everything under the sun.

Think of Bitcoin as a product and the blockchain as a clever network architecture that enables Bitcoin and a great many future products and institutions to do more things—or to do these things better, cheaper, more robust and more secure than products and institutions built upon legacy architectures.

Continue reading “Is a Blockchain a Blockchain if it Isn’t?” »