Author Archives: Ken Price

Are “Smart Contracts” really contracts?

During the “Tomorrow’s Transactions Toronto 2016” conference on September 29, the moderator, David Birch made an interesting comment. I’ll paraphrase: “Smart contracts are neither contracts nor smart”. He used the hacked DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) “smart contract” programmed on the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform as an example. The DAO was established as a series of smart […]

Read More

Digital Identity – What is it? Who cares?

Read a great article this evening by Sachin Mahajan: Digital Identity: Peeling back the onion…. Warp Global is kicking off a really exciting project next week with several major international firms to do just this. It’s my expectation that the biggest challenge these firms will face isn’t articulating a strategy or even executing on it. The […]

Read More

Digital Identity and Our Right to Privacy

Today Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s former Privacy Commissioner wrote a great article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail titled “Encryption is crucial to our privacy and freedom“. As we look at this issue on a  global basis it becomes rather more complicated. Not every jurisdiction in the world bestows the right to privacy onto its citizens. The […]

Read More

Blockchain, Crypto Currency and Identity

The Institute of International Finance published a paper on November 16, 2015 titled “Banking on the Blockchain: Re-engineering the Financial Architecture“. It’s an excellent read for those still trying to come to grips with what blockchain technology is all about. A key point made in the paper is the need for international collaboration in order […]

Read More

Is the European Union missing the point wrt terrorism and cryptocurrency?

Coindesk today wrote about an EU crackdown on bitcoin after the Paris attacks. Cash is the default value transfer mechanism of choice for terrorists. If anything, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin provide at least some capability for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to track down terrorists. Services like those offered by Elliptic provide transaction mapping capability which […]

Read More

Blockchain’s Potential Role in the Syrian Refugee Crisis

In a recent Coindesk article titled “Meet the Dad Who Registered His Daughter’s Birth on the Blockchain”, Santiago Siri explained why and how he did so. This got me to thinking about all the refugees leaving Syria and heading to continental Europe, Canada and the US. Many have no governmental identification whatsoever. They are interviewed […]

Read More