Blockchain Development Environments

Your blockchain development environment has a virus. It's called Windows. Of course, if you are a blockchain developer, you already know this.

The first time that I did a Docker installation of a BigchainDB  blockchain, there was a graceful implementation on Mac   & a kludge requiring 3 more pieces of software for Windows and it was problematic. (Docker & its smarter cousin Kubernetes are small, custom-configured server deployment execution environments that run on a laptop & act as a blockchain servers).

Because Mac is Unix based, and if you know Linux, you can actually fix installations that don't work. When a Microsoft Installer does something, everything is opaque & unfixable unless you have a few months to trace things through.

Now don't get me wrong. Mac blockchain installs are weird. You need a pile of stuff like curl, git, brew, node, npm, nvm, lts, as well as a couple of C & C++ compilers. You feel like you are typing in a Bosnian dialect and you would like to buy a vowel.  However, since you are issuing these commands separately, you knows what fails and what needs fixing. It isn't easier, but it is quicker to production.

Blockchains need crypto, hashing, peer networking and a database to make them blockchains. They ain't simple databases.


(originally appeared as a LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-bodnar-57b635133/ )

Transcendence in Blockchain

Blockchain 1.0 is toast. Creating ERC20 tokens today for payments is just another form of butt-scratching. It seems that almost every new offering today is just digital effluvia from a duplicated singleton button that everyone seems to want to press to make magic. Newsflash - only 8% of ICOs ever hit the exchanges.  Why? Because there is no transcendence.

New technology implies a transcendence of the stuff used to comprise it. Bitcoin transcended blockchain and became a crypto currency. Ethereum transcended Bitcoin by introducing smart contracts. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have value as a crypto-currency arising from their unique transcendence of their constituent elements. If you are making crypto because you have a different way to spend it, you are just like the guy who says that he has invented a new word called 'plagiarism'.

Blockchain is secure, transparent, autonomous & outage resistant. You have to find a way to use those constituent elements in an enchanting way that goes beyond the mere attributes of blockchain, Bitcoin or Ethereum. It has to transcend all of that.

When you use blockchain & tokens in a new way that changes forever the old way, you are truly disruptive.

 If I had a dollar for all ICOs that were truly disruptive, I'd be broke.


(originally appeared as a LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-bodnar-57b635133/ )

The Future of Things: Tokenization and Blockchain

I was an early adopter of the internet. It was put on my desk when I worked in a communications research lab. At the time, there were usegroups (electronic bulletin boards) and scientific papers.  It was neat but it didn't seem like much. There was no Google. There was no search.  The way to discover sites was with a spider written by a guy name Bob who had a Cool Sites that he spidered (web crawled).  A little while later, the very coolest and neatest thing on the internet, was a picture of a coffe pot in an English University that refreshed every 15 minutes.   I thought that it was neat, but at that point in time, I could not even envision how dramatically the Internet would change life.

Blockchain is at the same point as the nascent internet.  People will say "Remember the good old days of Bitcoin?" like they reminisce about Blockbuster Videos and America Online CDs.  The way that #Blockchain will revolutionize life, is through its ability to organize, monetize and revolutionize human activity and assets (actual and virtual) through TOKENIZATION.  Life will be almost completely tokenized with an astonishing interoperability of all things digital.  I intend to contribute to that tokenization effort. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

How Blockchain Can Put Professional Project Managers Out Of A Job

At one point in my career, there was a Gartner report out saying that about 72% of IT projects were in "Recovery". It means that they were either late, over-budget or missing milestones altogether. I saw evidence of that everywhere I looked, in the large organization where I worked at the time. Huge multi-million dollar projects came to nothing. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) were not met and things stalled -- sometimes because major stakeholders bickered over specifications after the project was started.

The band-aid fixes entailed adopting Agile methods where the scrum master was to remove impediments, or hire more consultants to speed things up. All of these actions rarely made any difference in the long run.

I have always believed that project management was merely applied common sense. I still believe it. However, I believe that common sense ain't so common. The failure of many projects hinges on missed details because the project manager operated at the 30,000 foot level, while the linchpin that caused the delay or failure was down in the weeds of project execution -- usually by a person not even on the radar of a project manager.

There has to be a better way, and to my mind, there is - blockchain. Here is the vision. Blockchain is a transparent, immutable, autonomous, outage-resistant true ledger that can have built-in intelligence with smart contracts. Suppose that instead of a Gantt chart, you had a series of smart contracts. The KPIs and milestones were all smart contracts. Having smart contracts forces one to think on an extremely granular level -- one not normally reached by a human project manager.

Each smart contract would assign a number of tokens to the project, based on activity completion. As each person in the project completed their tasks, they record their activity in the blockchain, and the blockchain itself keeps track of completion percentage by transferring tokens to the completion account. All of the tokens for that task or milestone are accounted for when complete. The sum total of all possible tokens represents a completed project meeting all goals. The blockchain is linked to an executive dashboard which does extensive drill-down reporting.

But wait, don't send money yet. There is more. Each entry in the blockchain feeds an AI engine that Map-Reduces and learns about the company's projects. This is the methodology of taking all process data (event logs and everything), integrating it into information and transforming it by abstraction into knowledge. This knowledge will be stored in a master blockchain which will have data to assist in the creation of smart contracts and the parameters necessary for future projects.

Such a system could not only out-perform a human project manager, but in the long run it would be cheaper. The most expensive part of most projects are usually the people costs and that area is usually the weakest link. The project management discipline is ripe for an AI/Blockchain disruption.