#fingafings

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Why Big U.S. Banks Are "Very Afraid" of Bitcoin

Big U.S. banks are likely to be "very afraid" of bitcoin, despite doubts from Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

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Jaguar Land Rover is backing DOVU to bring the Blockchain to the mobile future

The Blockchain was created as an open-source, free, decentralized accounting system where transactions are recorded across multiple computers. Its first use..

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It’s solar panel maintenance day at FingA! And of course, the bassets want to help.. 

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Russia's VEB and Ethereum seal partnership - FinanceFeeds

The partnership is poised to help find applications of blockchain, inter alia, in public administration.

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This summer's cyberattacks wrought havoc across maritime supply chains as malware destroyed or corrupted critical data that underpins global shipping operations

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BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese conglomerate Fosun...

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Some thoughts from our founder.

By Cornelius Myburgh.

The rise and rise, ad infinitum, of Bitcoin - and now, the rest.

There are two things I really need to stop talking about in my social situations. The first is my taste in music. The constant ‘have you heard of this band or those guys?’, it’s starting to bug even my closest friends. Not that I haven’t converted some of them to a few of my causes with artists like Shakey Graves or Dan Mangan. In fact, Shakey will be a featured artist on a local radio show at some point in the near future as a friend is in a position to do so. 

The second thing I need to stop bringing up are blockchains. I recently went to my folks place for a weekend, I was between friends and family and realized my “go to” subject of conversation had become bitcoin and blockchain tech. I spent at least four hours explaining it to my dad. He seemed to get it. Although separating the technology from the currency is not always easy. I tried my best to make it as simple as possible, keeping that quote from Einstein in mind. In any event, the recent boom only aided my cause in converting some of my family members. Most remain suspicious. 

And therein lies the rub. As the CEO and Founder of a blockchain startup in Africa, the exchange rate of BTC has rarely been my priority. I keep up to date with it, but do not really mind as we maintain a supply, and rarely capitalize on the ebbs and flows of the international trading and trends. I am more concerned about the regulation, application, adoption and disruption potential of the technology. The proof of concept I believe is complete and Satoshi has accomplished his goal. We now understand how to instantiate trust via peer to peer information sharing; and instantiating trust is no mean feat. Maintaining it even harder. Hence the 8 year trial period, the skepticism, the caution and suspicion was justified. Humanity is almost entirely built on trust. If I offer you something for something else in return, I might even be willing to negotiate lower if I could establish trust you would stick to the terms of the deal, now and in the future. Everything currently shared by us on the earth today at some point required that element to be included in the transaction. Which is why currency and banks exist in the first place. 

Let me give you a for instance. Like most startups, we operate entirely from home, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, sometimes even pubs. We maintain a burn chart of expenses and have our own current technologies in development. We provide services in order to accentuate the burn fund, but we pride ourselves on running a bare bones operation in FIAT terms. The technology we are working on spans from messaging related features and applications, to spam filtering and even some hardware integration. However, any hour away from your actual desk is an hour I can’t really afford. With this in mind, I recently made a proposal to a delivery person: Give me your contact details and if I need some specific items in order to make sure my guys can keep burning the hours, I would offer him a fee for that delivery, depending on the time and effort (including the time of day) the specific task that required. This has worked brilliantly and benefited me and our productivity greatly. There was no 3rd party sanction required. I trusted him and he trusted me in return, established quite easily with a friendly smile and a bro handshake. 

What we are learning now I guess, first digitally and I would hope eventually also existentially regarding this technology, is that that kind of trust usually costs us money. With cryptocurrency it’s just much cheaper. With BTC it is built in, with ETH it’s reducible and complex, with Tezos, hopefully adjustable. 

The BTC boom has also forced us to think again about how we conduct our day to day business here in Africa. The net result of the weekend’s boom is that we became almost 25% more expensive to any non-btc based entities. Something we hadn’t really anticipated previously, mainly as our customers just always used to also work with BTC. Now we’re forced to include a model and mechanisms that ensure we can react to these violent surges in the market. I guess that is the beauty about working in this space, there are measures and means developing which are inherently human and being re-built into our information structures and systems. The increase in popularity should actually be viewed as a basic indication of greater trust from the earth’s population. 

It’s an exciting time to be around, and especially to be here on the African continent; to be providing services which enable really motivated and talented people and who are just as excited as we are about the future of blockchain and distributed processing and infrastructure. It’s been a joy and I have a suspicion that the true impact will only be able to be retrospectively studied in the future. 

Cornelius Myburgh - Founder and CEO of FingA. August 2017.