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Here is the Assignment QuestionWeek 4 is a continuation of the discussion on Blockchain. The PPTs and resources from Week 3 are applicable here in Week 4 as well. ( I am attaching the previous discussion)Assignment Question: Industry experts believe blockchain is a technology that has the potential to affect the business of most IT professionals in the next five years. Pick an industry you feel will be most affected by blockchain and how blockchain may be used in that industry. As an IT manager, how would you embrace blockchain? For instance, how would training occur for your team, what strategies might you use, what security methods may you recommend be used?Your paper should meet the following requirements:• Be approximately 2-3 pages in length, not including the required cover page and reference page.• Follow APA6 guidelines. Your paper should include an ABSTRACT, introduction, a body with fully developed content, and a CONCLUSION.• Support your answers with the readings from the course and at least two scholarly journal articles to support your positions, claims, and observations, in addition to your textbook. The UC Library is a great place to find resources.• Be clearly and well-written, concise, and logical, using excellent grammar and style techniques. You are being graded in part on the quality of your writing.These are the reference which posted in classTarzey, B. (2019). Inside Blockchain and Its Various Applications. Computer Weekly, 16-20. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=f5h&AN=138681123&site=eds-liveCarson, B., Romanelli, G., Walsh, P., & Zhumaev, A. (2018). Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value? McKinsey Quarterly, (4), 118–127. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=buh&AN=133693412&site=eds-live discussion_2.docx inside_blockchain_and_its_various_applications.pdf blockchain_beyond_the_hype_what_is_the_strategic_business_value.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Running head: CRYPTOCURRENCIES Cryptocurrencies Name: Mukesh Goud Abbagoni University of Cumberlands 1 CRYPTOCURRENCIES 2 Cryptocurrencies The development in technology has prompted different currencies which are thought to be safe and fast. The use of cryptocurrencies is one such development. Cryptocurrencies are virtual money that serves just like ordinary money such as the dollars, pounds or even the thought has no physical counterparts such as the physical cash which can be carried around. As such, Cryptocurrencies acts as an electronic currency. There are different Cryptocurrencies which are used today in the world which includes; Bitcoin (BTC) Bitcoin is one of the oldest and original forms of cryptocurrency in use. It was created in 2009 as open-source software. Bitcoin uses blockchain technology which allows the users to make many transparent peer-to-peer transactions and the users can see all the transactions. However, to increase its security, Bitcoin is built using a security algorithm within the blockchain. Each owner of the bitcoin is given a security key they can use to decrypt the transactions. The system thus has an end to end encryption and hence making it much secure. Bitcoin users can control the sending and receiving of money unlike banks and hence gives room to anonymous transactions worldwide (Singhal et al., 2018). Litecoin (LTC) The Litecoin cryptocurrency was started in 2011. It is an open-source of global payment network which is decentralized and hence has no authority figure to control the transactions. The Litecoin currency is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that aids in faster transfers of funds overseas at super high speeds. The system uses cryptography to secure the Litecoin network as CRYPTOCURRENCIES 3 well as verify transactions, and regulate the unnecessary creation of new coins (Takashima, 2018). Similarities between Bitcoin and Litecoin Both the Bitcoin and Litecoin are members of cryptocurrency which use peer-to-peer electronic cash systems. Both Bitcoin and Litecoin are non-regulated and hence give room to anonymous transactions all over the world. Differences between Bitcoin and Litecoin Litecoin facilitates faster transactions as opposed to Bitcoin. Litecoin can be used large transactions up to 84 million while bitcoin can only allow transactions up to 21 million. Both bitcoin and Litecoin operates on different algorithms. Litecoin operates on Scrypt while bitcoin operates on SHA-256 CRYPTOCURRENCIES 4 References Singhal, B., Dhameja, G., & Panda, P. S. (2018). How Bitcoin Works. In Beginning Blockchain (pp. 149-217). Apress, Berkeley, CA. Takashima, I. (2018). Litecoin: The Ultimate Guide to the World of Litecoin, Litecoin Crypocurrency, Litecoin Investing, Litecoin Mining, Litecoin Guide, Cryptocurrency. Watson, L. (2018). Cryptocurrency Investing Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Unlock the Secrets of Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Investment Tips for Success. BUYER’S GUIDE TO BLOCKCHAIN | PART 2 OF 3 Inside blockchain and its various applications Bob Tarzey explores the technology around blockchain shaping how businesses use data W hen people interact with each other, for example via financial transactions, sharing legal documents or trading through supply chains, they need a high level of confidence that the data recording their interaction is accurate and true. A distributed ledger makes it possible to build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions online without the need to trust a central authority or indeed each other. Over the past few years, the number of use cases for distributed ledgers, and their more specialised form, blockchains, has been increasing, as has the technology to support the underlying infrastructure and build applications on top of it. With a distributed ledger, every user has their own full, or in some cases partial, copy of the database, referred to as a node, which can be a physical device, a virtual machine or a software container. Each node runs the relevant software to provide the infrastructure management and the relevant application, including the ability to complete “smart contracts” that negotiate the direct exchange of assets between participating nodes. GOLDEN SIKORKA/ADOBE Consensus For a transaction to proceed, all nodes must verify a transaction and agree its order on the ledger. Doing so is termed “consensus”, which is necessary, for example, to avoid double counting or overspending when it comes to financial assets. Consensus involves four steps, from the transaction being initiated to it being committed on all nodes with a timestamp HOME computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 16 BUYER’S GUIDE Home News How IT departments can find different ways to upskill in the new economy Travel company Clarity bakes ThoughtSpot search and AI functions into analytics tool Digital factory approach signals a new departure for Network Rail’s IT strategy Editor’s comment Buyer’s guide to blockchain Delivering cloud in the financial services sector How 5G will transform your business Downtime providing a unique cryptographic signature. These steps can be completed in seconds or minutes, depending on the technology. Blockchains are distinguished from other distributed ledgers in being updated by adding blocks of new transactions to create an immutable tamper-proof log of sensitive activity. The right to write blocks may require proof-of-work – which can be time and resource intensive – the aim being to prevent, for example, mass updates by bots. Nomenclature has become confusing as the two terms, distributed ledger and blockchain, have been used interchangeably, with the latter prevailing, being punchier and, perhaps, sounding more contemporary. it consumes in a process called mining, the form of proof-of-work, rewarded with bitcoins, used to add new blocks of transactions to the bitcoin blockchain. As the use of blockchains has extended to other use cases, the aim has been to overcome these deficiencies. Different approaches are enabled through frameworks which provide the basic architecture, protocol and network support. Frameworks simplify the development, deployment and support of applications that access a given blockchain. There are several blockchain frameworks which compete and/or address different requirements. Public or private The most widely used is Ethereum, an open source public blockchain framework. The first implementations were in 2015, but it is already thought to account for 80\% of blockchain-based projects. Ethereum suits highly distributed requirements where the transparency of data to all users is important – for example, a customer loyalty network where retailers need to independently verify a user’s activity to provide benefits. Ethereum was the first platform to enable full-fledged smart contracts, which, for example, makes it quick and easy to launch ICOs. Ethereum is also the name of a cryptocurrency based on the platform. The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric is an open source enterprise private blockchain framework suited to applications that require privacy and permission controls with a known set of members – for example, a financial application where certain Blockchains can either be public or private and require permission to update or not. Use cases range from international money transfers, managing shareholder records and legal contracts to recording the provenance of gemstones and the condition of goods in transport. To date, the most high-profile use of blockchain has been to operate cryptocurrencies, a way of exchanging and storing value online independent of central banks. From this has involved initial coin offerings (ICO), a way of using cryptocurrencies as an alternative to initial public offerings (IPO) for companies to raise capital. With the oldest and highest profile blockchain application, bitcoin, it can take many minutes for consensus to be reached, which is why the cryptocurrency has a reputation for poor performance and scalability. It is also criticised for the datacentre power Frameworks computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 17 BUYER’S GUIDE Home News How IT departments can find different ways to upskill in the new economy Travel company Clarity bakes ThoughtSpot search and AI functions into analytics tool Digital factory approach signals a new departure for Network Rail’s IT strategy trade-related data is only shared with select banks. In effect, it is a hub for the open development of blockchains for solving corporate tasks. The project started in 2015 and has more than 100 participating companies which pay a membership fee, starting at $50,000 per annum, enabling them to contribute software code to the project. Waves is an open source blockchain platform created by a Russian company specifically for launching ICOs; a distant second to Ethereum for doing this. It includes a decentralised trading exchange. Ripple is an open source platform used as an international currency exchange for both cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies. It is designed to allow fast and cheap international transactions. The NEM Foundation’s platform claims the scalability and performance to suit a range of use cases, including financial payments, cryptocurrencies, equity markets and escrow services, using a consensus algorithm called proof-of-importance that provides privileges to participants with the best reputations. Smart contract platform EOS is a smart contract platform and decentralised operating system intended for the deployment of industrial-scale applications. It aims to eliminate transaction fees and be highly scalable. R3’s Corda operates smart contracts, within the Java Virtual Machine, and is aimed at financial institutions. Iota is Editor’s comment Buyer’s guide to blockchain Delivering cloud in the financial services sector How 5G will transform your business ALEX/ADOBE Downtime computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 18 BUYER’S GUIDE Home News How IT departments can find different ways to upskill in the new economy Travel company Clarity bakes ThoughtSpot search and AI functions into analytics tool Digital factory approach signals a new departure for Network Rail’s IT strategy Editor’s comment Buyer’s guide to blockchain Delivering cloud in the financial services sector How 5G will transform your business Downtime an open source distributed ledger, customised to work with internet of things (IoT) applications providing feeless microtransactions. JP Morgan’s Quorum is Ethereum-based, claiming enterprise scalability and the ability to limit access to transaction history, while providing maximum transparency. Blockchain as a service Quorum has recently been selected by Microsoft as the first supported framework for its managed Azure Blockchain Service. The aim of such managed, blockchain-as-a-service offerings is to avoid self-hosting of blockchain infrastructure, eliminating the need to provision hardware, configure software and set up networking and security components, as well as ease the development of applications on top of one or more frameworks. The Microsoft Azure Blockchain Service was launched earlier in 2019, on top of earlier releases of a blockchain development kit and workbench. It integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory and Visual Studio, as well as a range of open source tools. The Amazon Managed Blockchain was launched in December 2018 and supports both Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims it enables the rapid creation of new blockchain networks that can span multiple AWS accounts, that can automatically scale to meet the demands of thousands of applications. It monitors the network and automatically replaces poorly performing nodes assigning processing power and memory flexibly, as would be expected on a managed platform. The launch of the service means AWS now competes with some of its platform partners, such as ConsenSys’s Kaleido. The IBM Blockchain Platform, launched in 2017, is based on Hyper Ledger. It can be run on-premise or as a cloud service on a customer-chosen platform and includes a set of security services suited to the requirements of enterprise customers. Oracle also released a blockchain platform based on Hyperledger Fabric in February 2019. Specialist requirements Alongside some of the IT industry’s biggest names, many smaller, niche players are coming to market to serve specialist requirements and applications relating to blockchain. Gospel Technology is a private permissioned blockchain aimed at safe data sharing. Use cases include human resources systems and pharmaceutical testing. To this end, it provides consensus on reads, as well as writes, ensuring that it is opaque about data, but open about who has accessed it. Because Gospel is focusing on content as much as transactions, the data volumes involved can be high, so network nodes can store a subset of the data relevant to their needs. This also means it can make use of Byzantine fault tolerance, meaning it can continue to operate even if the status of certain nodes is unknown. Gospel has just launched a version on the Google Cloud Platform, however, customers can use other platforms such as AWS or Azure. Modum is a Switzerland-based company currently operating mainly in Germany – with global plans. It partners with AWS and SAP. Its offering aims to automate, integrate and digitise supply chains, the initial focus market being pharmaceuticals. computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 19 BUYER’S GUIDE Home News How IT departments can find different ways to upskill in the new economy Travel company Clarity bakes ThoughtSpot search and AI functions into analytics tool Digital factory approach signals a new departure for Network Rail’s IT strategy Modum provides an IoT-type device with a data logger to be included with transported goods to monitor environmental conditions, such as temperature and humidity to prove compliance with good distribution practices. The data collected can be immutably secured in a blockchain and shared with stakeholders to add a layer of trust. Fraud prevention Tomia specialises in fraud prevention, traffic optimisation and roaming insights for mobile carriers. It provides real-time analytics and recently announced a partnership with Microsoft, KPMG and R3 to provide a blockchain-based system to optimise dispute management and help resolve billing and settlement disputes. Quant Network’s Overledger is a blockchain operating system providing the ability for applications to interact with multiple blockchains. The need for many-to-many relationships between applications and databases is not new: it was one that had to be addressed in the 1980s and 1990s with the rising use of relational databases. Standards were introduced and the market consolidated. This is what will happen in the world of blockchains. Furthermore, blockchain is not a panacea: it will never suit many applications where central control, extremely high speed or the mass storage of unstructured data are required. Blockchain merely provides another choice in the range of database options available. n Editor’s comment Buyer’s guide to blockchain Delivering cloud in the financial services sector How 5G will transform your business SASHKIN/ADOBE Downtime computerweekly.com 17-23 September 2019 20 Copyright of Computer Weekly is the property of TechTarget, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holders express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. UC MegaSearch Page 1 of 8 Record: 1 Title: Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value? Authors: Carson, Brant1 Romanelli, Giulio2 Walsh, Patricia3 Zhumaev, Askhat3 Source: McKinsey Quarterly. 2018, Issue 4, p118-127. 10p. 1 Color Photograph, 1 Diagram. Document Type: Article Subject Terms: *BLOCKCHAINS *DECENTRALIZATION in management *TRANSPARENCY in organizations *BUSINESS models *COST control *STRATEGIC planning Abstract: The authors discuss their study on the strategic business value of blockchain to major industries. They described a structured approach that companies can follow to examine blockchain strategies. The core advantages of blockchain are decentralization, cryptographic security, transparency, and immutability. It is said that the value of blockchain will shift from driving cost reduction to enabling entirely new business models and revenue streams. Author Affiliations: 1Partner, McKinseys Sydney office 2 Associate partner, Melbourne office 3 Consultant, Melbourne office. Full Text Word Count: 2881 ISSN: 0047-5394 Accession Number: 133693412 Database: Business Source Premier Blockchain beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value? Blockchain can generate meaningful value for many companies. The key is figuring out what strategy makes sense, given your customers pain points and your companys market position Blockchain is all the rage. Bitcoin-the first and most infamous application of the technology-has grabbed headlines for its rocketing price and volatility. Predictions such as the World Economic http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/delivery?sid=8dc22675-4fdf-488e-afce-023afbccdded\%40... 10/26/2019 UC MegaSearch Page 2 of 8 Forum survey suggesting that 10 percent of global GDP will be stored on blockchain by 2027 have inspired government task forces, breathless press reports, and a multitude of conversations at Davos and in corporate conference rooms.[ 1] Tellingly, large investments are being made. Last year, venture capitalists put more than $1 billion into blockchain start-ups.[ 2] Initial coin offerings (ICOs), the blockchain-backed sale of cryptocurrency tokens in a new venture, raised $5 billion in 2017. Leading technology players are putting money and people into blockchain: IBM has invested $200 million and more than 1,000 employees in the blockchain-powered Internet of Things (IoT).[ 3] Yet the fact remains that blockchain is an immature technology with a nascent market and no clear recipe for success. No wonder many corporate leaders are asking themselves a lot of questions. Is blockchain a disruptive threat? Is it a fad? Most importantly, can blockchain have strategic value for my company? To help answer these questions, we embarked on an industry-by-industry analysis of existing blockchain strategies, interviewing a range of experts including the executives overseeing these efforts at a number of companies. We evaluated the strategic importance of blockchain to major industries and identified who can capture what type of value through what type of approach. Our research led us to three key insights on the strategic value of blockchain: • Blockchain does not have to be a disintermediator to generate value. • Blockchains short-term value will be predominantly in reducing cost. • Commercially viable blockchain solutions deployed at scale are three to five years away for most companies. In this article, well explain how we arrived at these insights and well describe a structured approach companies can follow to evaluate blockchain strategies. Some organizations may discover ways to extract value from blockchain in the short term. Dominant companies may discover even more: if they are willing to invest now to establish their blockchains as market solutions, they can cement their leadership and forestall the incursion of disruptive digital natives. WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN? Blockchain is not synonymous with Bitcoin, which is just one cryptocurrency application that uses it. Blockchain is a distributed ledger, or database, shared across a public or private computing network. Each computer node in the network holds a copy of the ledger, so there is no single point of failure. Every pi ... Purchase answer to see full attachment