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Non-technical and accessible, this book seeks to demystify the functionalities of blockchains, their potential as well as their likely socio-economic impacts.

\"A book about how Web3 will develop and change the economy\"-- Provided by publisher.

The accessible, non-technical guide to applying and benefiting from blockchain technology. Blockchain has grown at an enormous rate in a very short period of time. In a business context, blockchain can level the playing field between small and large organisations in several ways: Exact copies of the immutable, time-stamped data is held by all parties, all transactions can be viewed in real time, data blocks are cryptographically linked, all raw materials are traceable and smart contracts ensure no middle-men, ease of audit and reduced friction. The trust, transparency, security, quality and reduced costs of blockchain make it a game-changing technology that crosses sectors, industries and borders with ease. Even though the technologies are ready for adoption, businesses remain largely unaware of their full potential and effective implementation. End users require accurate and up-to-date information on the practical applications of blockchain — Commercializing Blockchain provides it. A practical and easy-to-understand guide to blockchain, this timely book illustrates how this revolutionary technology can be used to transform governments, businesses, enterprises and entire communities. The author draws from his experience with global retailers, global technology companies, UCL Centre for Blockchain technologies, the government of the UK, Retail Blockchain Consortium and many other sources to present real-world case studies on the use and benefits of blockchain. Topics include financial transactions, tokenisation, identity management, supply chain transparency, global shipping and freight, counterfeiting and more. Provides practical guidance for blockchain transactions in business operations * Provides practical guidance for blockchain transactions in business operations * Demonstrates how blockchain can add value and bring increased efficiency to commercial operations * Covers all of the essential components of blockchain such as traceability, provenance, certification and authentication * Requires no technical expertise to embrace blockchain strategies Commercializing Blockchain: Strategic Applications in the Real World is ideal for enterprises seeking to develop and deploy blockchain technology, particularly in areas retail, supply chain and consumer goods.

This is a guide to the disruptions, innovations, and opportunities that technology provides the insurance sector and acts as an academic/industry-specific guide for creating operational effectiveness, managing risk, improving financials, and retaining customers. It also contains the current philosophy and actionable strategies from a wide range of contributors who are experts on the topic. It logically explains why traditional ways of doing business will soon become irrelevant and therefore provides an alternative choice by embracing technology.

The dominance of trusted intermediaries could be weakened by blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, one of the functions of which is to constitute timestamped proofs by replacing inter-individual trust with algorithmic trust.

Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt digital interaction across our economy and society. As the internet has changed our lives, the potential for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to do the same is considerable. Fred Steinmetz, Lennart Ante and Ingo Fiedler assess this rapidly developing technology and its imminent economic and societal impact. The ideas behind blockchain technology stem from an open-source movement and build on existing technology to facilitate the exchange of value in general and assets in particular via a protocol on top of the internet. Current platform-based business structures face the risk of being replaced by evolving decentralized ecosystems and individuals are set to become empowered by sovereignty over their digital data and footprints. The book begins by explaining the key concepts of blockchain technology and presents an overview of the involved technical and economic elements. These form the basis for a discussion of the socio-economic implications of this new technology. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of significant case studies in the sectors of energy, digital identity, capital markets, logistics and gambling that outline the risks and benefits of the technology. The book strives to be non-technical and accessible, and to demystify the functionalities of blockchains and their potential for a range of readers in the wider social sciences.

\"Smart contracts\" are decentralized agreements built in computer code and stored on a blockchain. Proponents imagine a future where commerce takes place exclusively using smart contracts, avoiding the high costs of contract drafting, judicial intervention, opportunistic behavior, and the inherent ambiguities of written language. These decentralized code-only contracts are part of a decades-long quest to eliminate supposed inefficiencies in traditional written agreements. Electronic data interchange (EDI), a contracting technology from the 1970s, was designed with the same goal and garnered similar fanfare. Commentators at the time imagined a revolution in the way firms transacted and a full shift away from anything resembling a paper contract. Ultimately EDI failed to achieve these goals—it empowered, rather than circumvented, human decisionmakers along with their \"inefficient\" way of forming agreements. In doing so, EDI successfully reduced some transaction cost while preserving efficient forms of contractual flexibility. Smart contracts are indeed more technologically sophisticated than EDI. Smart contract scripting languages offer a broader range of operations and greater scalability. Smart contracts are capable of seamlessly integrating with the operational and financial systems at the core of modern firms, whereas EDI transactions occurred in very early digital environments that required human intermediaries. Proponents of the smart contract revolution, therefore, do not describe the technology as a way to merely enhance human activity; they argue it can replace every stage of agreement formation and performance. From a purely technical standpoint, they might be right. However, shifting away from human-language contracts creates new inefficiencies. These stem from three features of smart contracts: automation, which requires that every agreement be formed from fully-defined terms; decentralization which conditions performance on verification by third parties; and anonymity, which eliminates the use of commercial context to give meaning to agreement terms. As a result, it is extremely costly to form smart contracts in a volatile environment or whenever there's a level of uncertainty surrounding the agreement. On the other hand, semantic contracts are flexible. They enable parties to use performance standards, generally-defined contract terms, to create an enforceable agreement without requiring complete knowledge of what might happen in the future. Standards also allow parties to responsively incorporate commercial customs into their agreement, circumventing the need for explicit but redundant negotiation. And once their agreement is formed and executed, the parties are nonetheless free to dynamically shape their relationship through informal modifications or by selectively enforcing breaches. These two forms of flexibility—linguistic ambiguity, and enforcement discretion—create important efficiencies in the contracting proces. By eliminating this flexibility, smart contracting will impose costs that are more severe and intractable than the ones it seeks to solve.