Experiments with IoT and Blockchain

In the previous blog, I had written a smart contract that allowed hash of an artifact to be added to the blockchain. Although the programming of the smart contract was pretty simple, the deployment of the contract on the blockchain was pretty cumbersome. A framework makes this task easy. The two popular frameworks used for Dapp development are Truffle and Embark . Both have a lot of features and allow a lot of customizations and test-based development. In this tutorial, I will provide examples of how to program a Dapp using Truffle framework. The purpose of this Distributed Application (Dapp) is to allow an initial set of ‘shareholders’ to fairly distribute profits from an external source among themselves. The smart contract must be able to do the following: Accept profits sent as ETH to the contract. Allow shareholders to withdraw their fair portion of the profits based on their % ownership at the time of the profits being paid in. Allow a shareholder to transfer his or...

Most financial institutions in India evaluate an Individual for creditworthiness based on their CIBIL  score. However, no such creditworthiness scores are available for corporate. I believe a lot of time and effort is spent by many companies in researching on the financial health status of other companies they are dealing with before they can supply them with services/goods on credit. I haven't found any existing solution (at least in the Indian context) that provides the creditworthiness of a corporate. With the new tax regime GST, I believe there is a scope for a good product that can be built over blockchain that would evaluate the creditworthiness of a company. Probably prevent another Stayzilla? I am sure the same solution would find its application in other geographies too. I will update this blog with more details on the POC for this use-case that I am working in the weeks to come.

Unless you have been living in a cocoon, you would have heard of the controversy surrounding the music director Ilayaraja and the singer SPB. There was excessive social media outrage over the issue and both sides had vociferous and sane backers. While this controversy was raging, I was busy learning and researching blockchain development and this got me to think that the resolution of the royalty issue could be a potential use-case for my blockchain application development. Royalty and licensing issue are quite common to almost all industries (not just the publishing industry but software/product industry as well). Piracy causes loss of revenue in many ways. My proposed solution to resolve this issue is Every publisher/artists/author must publish his content along with a smart contract (containing the royalty logic) into the public Ethereum blockchain. The content being published will be signed with references to these smart contracts (maybe as a new ID3 tag, which can't...

None of the tutorials on the internet that involve setting up of a private Ethereum TestNet on the latest version 1.5.8 and above. so I decided to document my experiences on getting this done. Most Ethereum clients allow you to connect to two separate public block chains. The main blockchain network, which would require you to make use of *real ether* for all transactions or you can make use of the TestNet. On the test network, you have the ability to mine ether which can then be used for all your transactions. In order to develop distributed apps (Dapps) you will need access to an Ethereum client and an Ethereum wallet. Mist  the most popular wallet used by most developers for creating Dapps. However, if you have limited resources and would still like to build Dapps, I would recommend using MetaMask . MetaMask is a Chrome plugin(a plugin for FireFox is also expected to be released soon). This plugin acts a thin client that allows the user to connect to both the live Ethereum ...

"If you are not profoundly shocked by quantum mechanics, you haven't really understood it!"         ~ Niels Bohr. Frankly, I didn't understand what Bohr meant by this quote on quantum mechanics. But ever since I have started to read and experiment with Ethereum and Blockchain, I have started to realize a parallel to Bohr's quote w.r.t this new technology. I do understand that many, would now be wondering "what the hell am I blabbering??". Let me attempt to explain to you my shock through a series of blogs, which will also help me to recollect my learning over time. To understand Ethereum and Blockchain, one has to understand its parent, the Bitcoin.  I first heard of Bitcoin back in 2014 while working on a European startup. Apparently then a Nigerian bus booking company had implemented Bitcoin API to accept payments for bus travel. Although I was intrigued by the term, once I started to read through it I was confused and apprehensive (Nigeria, ...