Amazon Secures Two Patents to Provide Data Storage and Crypto Solutions

Andres Chavez
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Amazon Secures Two Patents to Provide Data Storage and Crypto Solutions

Amazon is advancing leaps and bounds above its competition when it comes to cryptography and distributed data storage solutions. The influential e-commerce site revealed that this week, it won not one, but two patents for methods to safeguard digital signatures integrity and optimizing distributed data storage.

Both patents were published by the USPTO, which is the United States Patent and Trademark Office, this Tuesday. The USPTO is the organism in charge of dealing with permissions and patents.

Protecting Digital Signatures and Encrypted Communications

One of the patents was filled seven months ago and it sketches a tool for delegate signatures with the intention of “protecting the integrity of digital signatures and encrypted communications,” while fostering the “creation, distribution, validation, and revocation of one-time-use cryptographic keys,” according to a piece of news published in Cointelegraph today.

The approach proposed that these cryptographic keys in the form of a “Merkle Tree” structure, known within the industry as a binary tree of hashes that is built starting from the bottom and going up.

According to Hackernoon, the Merkle Trees are a vital part of how blockchain solutions work, as, by nature, they facilitate the verification of big portions of data in an efficient manner.

The system works like this: the Merkle Root is the entity in charge of summarizing the transaction-related information, which is then saved, or stored, in the block header, which will safeguard its integrity. The Root will be modified if any detail, as small as it may be, changes in the operation. Therefore, the Merkle Tree will allow the system to test if a particular transaction is part of the set.

Amazon’s Version of the Merkle-Tree Model

The Merkle Tree-based model that Amazon proposes intends to determine how to delegate signing power or authority from a central entity to the myriad of agents that have the authorization to do it on its name. “The signature authority provides a key-distribution service that distributes blocks of cryptographic keys to authorized signing delegates. An authorized signing delegate contacts the key-distribution service and requests a block of cryptographic keys” can be read in the patent document.

Amazon’s service has the ability to verify the entity with a revocation value “associated with the revoked cryptographic key” if the cryptographic key happens to be flagged as invalid “after a key revocation service queries the Merkle tree of delegable keys.”

The other patent was filled almost three years ago, precisely in December 2015, and it has more to do with distributed data storage, proposing a grid encoding system that implements groups of “shards”, each one playing the role of logical distribution of data items stored in a given grid.

Amazon has long been in a quest to expand outside of its comfort zone, successfully venturing in world technology, data storage, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. The American e-commerce giant won a patent to build a streaming data marketplace to let users receive immediate crypto transaction information back in April.

By Andres Chavez

Banks from Brazil and Japan Use Ripple for International Payments.

Samuel Paz
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Banks from Brazil and Japan Use Ripple for International Payments.

The Japanese Bank (MUFG) and Bradesco signed an alliance for the development of a system of cross-border payments between these countries, a product that will be supplied with the help of Ripple. Bradesco is in second place, of the most important banks in Brazil.

With regard to the report released by MUFG, the banking unit of Mitsubichi UFJ Financial Group, the banks signed an agreement to extend the previous agreement made in 2017, which committed both entities to work collaboratively in the development of a system of sending remittances between residents of both countries.

Within the expectations of this new project, Bank MUFG Brazil, the branch of the Japanese bank in Latin America, and Bradesco expect that this system offers a high speed of processing, transparency in all its operations and traceability in its transactions.

This agreement contemplates Ripple as one more member in the development of payment systems. Ripple, like other cryptocurrencies on the market, offers the possibility of making instant international payments through a Blockchain, a service that in the specific case of Ripple, is a price to financial entities as a commercial product.

This alliance between Ripple and MUFG has remained a constant in the development of financial products within the private sector. The entity is among the most important and recognized in Japan, and was one of the first to be established in Brazil. MUFG has been working with Ripple since it began to be part of a consortium of Japanese banks, focused on international payment services.

Ripple in Asia

Beyond Brazil, Ripple is consolidating its business market in Asia, a continent where a new payment system hosted at RippleNet was established, which will provide services to the Thai bank Ayudhya (Krugsri), MUFG and the US bank, Standard Chartered.

There is the talk of an international payment system known as “Krugsri Blockchain Interledger”, which will enable the sending of remittances between Japan and Thailand, as well as soon provide services to Singapore, with the help of Standard Chartered.

The launch of the product was cataloged by the Thai bank as something innovative. However, it is known that the system will not use the XRP as a currency but XCurrent, stating that this is a more popular method in the banking products offered by Ripple.

The project took place in May, in which a certain amount of pilot tests were conducted to verify the effective functioning of xCurrent in the payment system, tests where funds were transferred from Thailand to Singapore and vice versa.

Also, Ripple has managed to consolidate its product to a total of 100 banking entities worldwide, of which a large proportion are located in Asia, including the latest alliances with the South Korea bank, Woori Bank, the bank Thai Siam Commercial and the SBI Holdings entity for transnational payments.

By Samuel Paz

Major Industry Collapse

Andres Chavez
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Major Industry Collapse

Bitcoin Falls under the $5,600 Threshold for the First Time in a Year

The week has not treated Bitcoin or any of the top altcoins kindly. Whereas a few days ago, technical indicators were pointing up for the world’s premier cryptocurrency, now it has collapsed in spectacular fashion, leaving investors and the whole community in the dark wondering what is happening and what the future may hold.

After surpassing the $6,500 threshold last week, Bitcoin’s price has behaved strangely in the past couple of days, mostly going downwards. At one point near noon (Eastern Time) it had collapsed all the way down to $5,563, almost a 10% loss in the last 24 hours (the precise number is 12.98 percent.)

The figure is, by far, the lowest of 2018. In fact, it is the lowest reported price number since November 11th, 2017. It has been a roller coaster ride with Bitcoin over the last few weeks, but Wednesday has been a worrisome day as the sessions opened at $6,297.96.

Investors React to the Latest Decline

The huge fall in price has caused investors to sell their assets as a reactionary measure, and other altcoins have suffered the same fate. According to the data site OnChainFX, some digital assets have experienced more than 20% losses in the last day. A couple of them are MANA, BAT, and DNT.

The total market cap in the industry experienced a heavy loss in the last day, with more than $24 billion gone in the last 24 hours. And with uncertainty surrounding the industry, Wednesday crisis could keep worsening.

There are no current developments or piece of news that can be directly signaled as the primary causes of the price decline. Now, experts within the industry are in agreement with the future bearish condition of the market to continue beyond 2019.

“Putting together the blockchain view, I suspect the timing for a bottom may be around Q2 2019,” those were the words of Willy Woo, who currently functions as the creator of the Woobull site, also stating that a “long grind upwards” will only take place after a true accumulation band.

Altcoins were also Heavily Affected

The Bitcoin industry developments were not alone this Wednesday, as the sad picture was accompanied by the performance of some of the most prominent altcoins. The case of Ethereum (ETH) was notable, as it had gone all the way down to the $180 range at the time of writing this piece. The top altcoin was trying to sustain its value between the $200-$210 range, but now has to climb out of a hole.

The case of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) also has the added circumstance of the upcoming November 15th hard fork. The token reversed recent gains, reaching $433.34 at press time, which means a drop in value of 18.07 percent.

NEM (14.95 percent), Ripple (-11.43 percent), Stellar (11.51 percent), EOS (14.49 percent), Litecoin (12.61 percent), Cardano (14.07 percent), Tether (1.05 percent), Monero (13.19 percent), Tron (14.91 percent), Dash (12.09 percent), and the rest of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap, including IOTA, Binance Coin, NEO, Ethereum Classic, Tezos, Zcash, and VeChain lost value on Wednesday.

By Andres Chavez

Australia Promotes a Blockchain-Based Plan for People with Disabilities

Maria Rodríguez
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Using Smart Money makes it possible to automate the process. This avoids the issuance of receipts, bureaucratization and the risk of fraud

The sending of digital assets to charities will now be faster, more direct and more precise, thanks to the project in which the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and the digital innovation center Data61 work, based on blockchain technology.

The Australian Federal Government is exploring the use of “smart money” to apply it in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The news was announced in October and confirmed on Tuesday, November 13th. Both companies have developed the “smart” or “programmable” money, i.e. a token that can be used to make payments according to certain guidelines.

With the “Smart Money” people are able to determine in which services they want to spend the token, at what time and its recipient, in order to manage the insurance payments, the budgeting, and management of the trusts, as well as the payments intended for non-profit organizations. Additionally, a distributed book ensures that there is an immutable and auditable record of expenses and circulation of money.

“This has been an important research project for understanding the benefits and limitations of blockchain technology in the context of conditional payment environments, such as the NDIS. Our use of blockchain added new kinds of programmable behaviors to the smart money in the prototype system. This automation and flexibility could reduce friction and enable greater innovation in many payment environments and unlock network-effect benefits”, says Dr. Mark Staples, Senior Principal Researcher in the Software and Computational Systems program at CSIRO’s Data61.

According to Staples, this could include more directly connecting citizens to public policy programs, “empowering people to optimize their spending through things like smart savings plans and smart diets, and reducing costs for businesses, including the potential for self-taxing transactions”.

How the idea was born

In the proof of concept, called “Making Money Smart” (PoC), ten people and several service providers for people with disabilities participated, using a prototype application adapted to the NDIS.

Data61’s representatives explained that the NDIS was chosen as a proof of concept because it “implies highly personalized payment conditions” because the beneficiary individuals and their caregivers receive specific amounts of funds to spend on different services provided by the plan.

The CBA model indicated that the system’s economic profitability would reach “hundreds of millions of dollars per year”. The Smart Money test uses a token solution that could be integrated for the future with the New Payment Platform of Australia.

Julie Hunter, the Commonwealth Bank’s Head of Government, says the trial results also show potential to reduce administration costs for disability service providers and the risk of fraud and accidental misspending.

In Australia, important initiatives are being developed to integrate blockchain technology in both the financial and health sectors. In this area, the Government plans to finance research on how to take advantage of blockchain technology as a tool for cancer detection.

This July, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) signed a five-year agreement with the Australian government for approximately $ 740 million, to use blockchain and other new technologies to improve data security and automation in federal departments, including Defense and Internal Affairs.

By María Victoria Rodríguez

Brazil Looks for Measure to Face the Criminal Use of Cryptocurrencies

Samuel Paz
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Brazil Looks for Measure to Face the Criminal Use of Cryptocurrencies

Justice entities in Brazil propose to build a research methodology to deal with money laundering cases with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The discussion on the subject will take place in an institutional association, known in Brazil as the National Strategy to Combat Corruption and Money Laundering. This group includes more than 70 institutions belonging to the three public powers of Brazil, which will meet in a national meeting between November 19 and 23, reported a national media.

According to the report, the objective is to evaluate the good practices applied worldwide for the cryptocurrency sector. With this base, they will establish a regulation with which a research flow model is offered to be adopted by researchers, promoters and other judicial entities.

Spokesmen of the Federal Police indicated that the lack of rules for the research flows of these crimes influences the effectiveness of the police in combating money laundering. This source stressed a case of the month of July, known as Operation Antigoon, where the police conducted research work to a criminal organization linked to drug trafficking worldwide. In this case, the criminals made millionaire transfers paid in bitcoins, but the Federal Police has not defined who to request the blocking of the securities negotiated in cryptactives.

Also, Camila Colares, Director of the Department of Asset Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, pointed out that she faces the challenge of finding a balanced solution.

The difficulty of regulation that we have today is because we still do not know the potential negative and positive-of these virtual assets. And it is in this context – of a topic on which there is still much to discover – that the Enccla discussed this issue in a broader way in 2018 and will continue the discussion in 2019 – now with a more criminal bias, always thinking of a responsible approach.

However, groups such as ABCB (Brazilian Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain) and ABCripto (Brazilian Association of Cryptoeconomics) were not called for the ENNCLA meeting, according to another medium in the country. In this way, the discussion will not count on the contributions of members of the ecosystem.

Regulatory Movements in Brazil

There have been several movements by the authorities to achieve greater control over the cryptocurrency ecosystem. At the beginning of November, the body responsible for tax collection issued a set of rules that require reporting all operations of purchase of cryptoactive. This rule will apply both to cases of change and to natural and legal persons. This regulation is still in public consultation.

On the other hand, the use of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies in money laundering has been reported in other cases in Brazil. In March of this year, a money laundering operation was discovered that worked in a jail in Rio de Janeiro. In that case, the criminals also used cryptactives for money laundering.

By Samuel Paz

Hospital Will Use Blockchain to Develop Healthcare Information Exchange Platform

Andres Chavez
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Hospital Will Use Blockchain to Develop Healthcare Information Exchange Platform

As the days go by, there is increasing proof that the blockchain model can be adapted to just about any process, with the potential of optimizing processes and adding reliability and trust that was not evident before its inception to our everyday life.

This time, the medical sector stepped up to the plate, with one of South Korea’s biggest hospitals teaming up with a local tech firm as they both intend to develop a medical services ecosystem powered by blockchain technology. The piece of news was made public this Tuesday via a press release from the medical institution.

A Fruitful Partnership

The hospital, named Myongji, made the deal official after the signature of a MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with Korean IT (Information Technology) firm BICube, a self-called machine learning platform.

The primary intention of the strategic alliance is to create a system in which health care institutions can exchange valuable information under the same platform. The Myongji Hospital intends to build a “hybrid cloud” ecosystem to merge the benefits of private and public clouds, the statement read.

The idea is a fantastic one, as it would allow patients to share sensitive medical information between medical institutions (after due authorization) without having the data to be stored in a centralized way. That could be achieved thanks to the hybrid cloud capabilities. The plan is for the two companies involved to start offering the health care information exchange system next year.

Another Pro-Blockchain Development in a Country Full of Them

For years, South Korea has demonstrated it has some of the most evidently pro-crypto people. In the month of September, the KISA (Korea Internet and Security Agency,) the Ministry of Science, and ICT made public their intention of running their public blockchain pilot program for a further six projects. Additionally, the decision was made to invest nearly $9 million to extend blockchain technology affairs throughout the private and public sectors within the country.

Also, the  South Korea Government is eager to keep developing the blockchain technology in the nation and is willing to spend money to ensure its application. It announced in the past few days that there would be an investment of $35 million reserved in the 2019 budget to help promote the approach, almost tripling 2018’s allocation, according to the specialized crypto news site Cointelegraph.

The week has been positive when it comes to crypto and blockchain-related announcements in the Health Care Department. On Monday, the Austrian government announced its intentions to help financially support Lancor Scientific, a UK-based company that intends to develop the Tumour Trace OMIS (Opto-magnetic Imaging Spectroscopy) device, which will use AI and blockchain technologies to “deliver low-cost and near real-time cancer screening at scale.”

A Little More about the Myongji Hospital

The Myongji Hospital, located in the city of Goyang, South Korea, has been functioning since 1987. In the last two years, it concluded an agreement on a dispatch of Korea Disaster Relief Team (KDRT) with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, it opened the New Horizon Cancer Institute, and it joined the Mayo Clinic Care Network.

The institution provides high-level medical treatment, high-tech medical research and training, and superb medical resources.

By Andres Chavez

 

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