Have you ever tried to explain Bitcoin or cryptocurrency to a friend, only for them to stare doe-eyed into the display, and saying, “I don’t understand a word of this!” 

Sometimes it’s hard to explain these concepts to newbies, and it’s more than a little challenging to explain the past and future of cryptocurrency in simple terms. It’s also not the easiest thing to, you know, explain who the hell Satoshi Nakamoto actually was. 

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible either. One of the best ways you can educate people of all ages regarding the blockchain is to stop practicing so much “expert commentary”, and instead use a video tutorial to better explain the fundamentals of blockchain tech. 

In this article we’re going to consider some of the basics, and also share some video tutorial links that will further your education. 

Why Understanding the Blockchain Matters

Emphasizing blockchain theory first is important, and even more so than the cryptocurrency, which is what most people have heard about. 

The blockchain refers to a system of recording transactions, sort of like a digital ledger, but one that cannot be easily changed, hacked, or altered. Every new transaction is distributed across a network of linked P2P computer systems and usually involves cryptocurrency. 

Explaining this simple fact helps people to understand that blockchain is ultimately about decentralizing many financial processes. Every member of the network has a copy of the distributed virtual ledger book, meaning everyone can verify transactions for themselves, and not rely on a central finance company to oversee the process. 

Besides, blockchain technology is what is rapidly growing, arguably more than or at least equal to crypto itself. Multiple industries are using blockchain tech for their own purposes, viewing it as a new commodity – and one without a central authority. 

The invention of Bitcoin was actually to help everyone learn to “make their own bank” and eliminate middlemen or intermediary companies when possible. 

The Best Learning Resources for New Blockchain Trainees

Who better to explain blockchain than the movers and shakers behind Ethereum.org? The site has plenty of guides to crypto basics, wallets, Web3, energy consumption, glossaries, and understanding blockchain ledgers. You can even access a forum to ask questions. 

If you prefer to read such complicated concepts in book form, you can buy “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction Illustrated Edition” via paperback, hardcover, or Kindle. 

But one of the best video programs on the blockchain is by Gary Gensler, who offers an in-depth YouTube commentary on the blockchain, as well as a complete video course available from MIT OpenCourseWare.

Gary covers contextual history, failed digital currencies, blockchain theories, technology, financial sector problems, blockchain potential opportunities, challenges with blockchain technology, Q&As, and much more. 

Over at SimpliLearn, there is a tutorial focusing on the future of money in general, and why blockchain is set to change much of our future. This video course goes into more detail regarding decentralization, and how that actually protects intellectual property. The course also discusses how companies can use blockchain to Strengthen their business model. 

Video Streaming and Blockchain Coincide

Over at Medium, there’s a thought-provoking article covering how video streaming and blockchain are both transforming the modern internet. Streaming technology with video is actually growing astronomically in usage. Video is already expected to reach 4 zettabytes, and by the end of the year, it’s believed that over 80% of all internet traffic will be for videos. 

The quality of videos is improving, with 4K, 8K and 360 experiences, and so we are changing the way we create niche entertainment, find new markets, and deliver customized experiences to others. You can even buy free video loop footage for films, educational videos, and other projects. 

The internet is certainly helping us to connect to virtual niche communities all over the world. With tech as promising as the ISOVerse or Meta, we’re seeing the distant future today – a virtual world will billions of tradeable, virtual commodities. 

An Unregulated Decentralized Social Media

But where it gets interesting is how blockchain-based video is rising in popularity. Blockchain is now helping users to encrypt their videos and store the videos permanently using an “IPFS swarm.” 

These broadcasts rely on relay nodes and IPFS to not only protect creators (by ensuring the integrity of ownership), but also to decentralize hosting. Just read this jaw-dropping article from Legacy Research, covering how social media may eventually become free of censorship with a decentralized blockchain approach to users maintaining their own content. 

The Blockchain Is Your Future, One Way or Another

The future of blockchain is intrinsically tied in with the cultural and commercial trends of modern consumers in general. Whatever we want, and however we want to connect with others, technology finds a way to deliver that custom experience. The blockchain promises more user-created and user-stored media and the sky’s the limit. 

Now is the time to understand blockchain tech not only because it’s the future of our culture, but also because now is the time to invest and find a way to use blockchain for your own business goals. 

The technology can help circumvent traditional barriers to women’s empowerment.

When women and girls in Afghanistan were barred from attending schools, many resorted to online courses to continue their education. Blockchain, with its public accessibility and pseudonymity, could help them obtain globally recognised tamper-proof and portable credentials.

It has the potential to transform education by resolving infrastructural and institutional-related costs typically faced by less developed and geographically remote communities. But blockchain’s ability to empower women striving to escape poverty goes beyond education. It can Strengthen social inclusion by granting equal opportunities to every individual regardless of background and status.

Blockchain technology provides women with financial inclusion and entrepreneurial opportunities to gain independence and self-sufficiency.

It offers small business owners affordable and efficient cross-border payments, and can help women gain access to previously unavailable finance. In countries that still prohibit women from having property rights, women can turn to blockchain or cryptocurrencies to circumvent restrictive cultural norms and gain financial access outside of the traditional banking system.

Female micro-entrepreneurs without assets for collateral can turn to crypto-funding to finance their business.

For example, the Grameen Foundation offered blockchain-enabled micro-financing to support women entrepreneurs in the Philippines during COVID-19. Blockchain technology has also been used to aid women refugees in humanitarian crises.

Immigration systems can provide unidentifiable and displaced people with verifiable personal identification on a blockchain-based database.

Financial assistance can be deposited in the form of digital currency or cryptocurrency at minimal transaction cost into their accounts to enable them access to basic amenities. Since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have been widely adopted in various sectors.

A latest report by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that blockchain technology has the potential to increase global GDP by US$1.76 trillion in the next ten years.

As a revolutionary technology, blockchain has significant potential for empowering women in vulnerable and marginalised communities. It can Strengthen their livelihood which then reduces household, community and national poverty. The two most critical aspects that can help women gain equality are better access to education and income-generating opportunities.

Blockchain technology can be the tipping point for social inclusion and poverty alleviation.

Also Read: Tether reduces commercial paper reserves for USDT to zero

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The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

Oct 13, 2022 (Alliance News via COMTEX) -- Research Methodology

New York (U.S) There were five stages to the research study on the Blockchain Market : secondary research, primary research, subject matter expert guidance, quality check, and final review. Statistical and cogent models for the market were used to assess and forecast the market data. Additionally, market shares and important trends were taken into account when creating the study. The Market Time Line Analysis, Vendor Positioning Grid, Market Overview and Guide, Company Market Share Analysis, Company Positioning Grid, Standards of Measurement, Top to Bottom Analysis, and Vendor Share Analysis are additional data models that can use.

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

Let’s face it: The labor market is completely outdated. It’s been that way for a while. Change is finally coming based on three major forces all converging. These forces — the volatile and disrupted labor market, rising privacy concerns and the emergence of blockchain technology — are creating a necessary change in the way individuals navigate their careers and livelihood, and how employers and other stakeholders in the labor market make workforce-related decisions. The possible end result is a once-in-a-generation revolution for the job market. 

A volatile and disrupted labor market 

Technological and social changes are driving the mega-trends for the future of work. With the global skills gap, talent shortage, job market polarization, deepened inequalities and the rising tide of non-standard employment, the labor market continues to be one of humanity’s biggest challenges for the next decades. 

The right to work — the free choice of employment — is a basic human right. The modern labor market is fragmented, ultra-specialized, filled with all sorts of alternative work arrangements or gig employment. It becomes an extremely confusing environment to navigate as the growing sense of job insecurity cuts to the core of identity and social stability. Now more than ever, we need to accelerate our ability to develop and deploy human capital on a global scale. 

Rising privacy concerns 

With the arrival of the commercial internet in the 1990s, data collection efforts began exponentially ramping up to generate mountains of information. The personal data users give away for free is transformed into a precious commodity. For a long time, brands could do this unabated, and consumers did not voice their concerns. However, that’s beginning to change. According to the Pew Research Center, 79% of Americans now report being concerned and confused and feeling a lack of control about the way companies are using their personal information. These growing concerns and the cascade of privacy scandals that have come to light in latest years are driving legislatures towards much more rigorous privacy legislation and enforcement. 

The emergence of distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) 

Blockchain is no longer just about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general. Instead, it can be seen as a disruptive, revolutionary technology that will have major impacts on multiple aspects of our lives. A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger that is shared among nodes of a computer network that are operated by a community of independent and unrelated entities, usually incentivized to provide computational resources to the network. The innovation of blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of the records of data it stores and generates trust without the need for a centralized controlling entity. 

The revolutionary power of such technology compares with the revolution sparked by the internet. Just as the internet is a means of sharing information, so blockchain technologies can be seen as a way to introduce the next level: sharing trust.

Fixing the broken data layer underlying the global labor market

The emerging contours of the new world of work are rapidly becoming a lived reality for millions of workers around the world. The opportunities for economic prosperity, societal progress and individual flourishing inherent in this new world of work are enormous. Yet they depend crucially on the ability of all concerned stakeholders to instigate reforms in education and training systems, labor market policies, business approaches to developing skills, employment arrangements and existing social contracts. 

Hiring people based on what they say about their own skills, identity and education credentials is terribly inefficient. Self-reported career records are unreliable and non-standardized. Misrepresentation is common. Verifying applicants’ and employees’ data requires manual, weeks-long processes that add unimaginable friction and cost to the labor market. As a matter of fact, today’s labor market’s data exchange infrastructure has more in common with the outdated postal service than with this generation’s digital world. 

It is clear that we need a new data-sharing architecture to replace the outdated, fragmented way talent represents their career reputation across the labor market via resumes and other self-reported online profiles. 

Blockchain technology has the power to overcome these challenges by letting individuals own their careers and personal information, rather than relying on LinkedIn and other third-party job boards which ultimately control an individual’s data.

The blockchain has the potential to radically change the way people navigate their careers and livelihoods and how employers make talent decisions. Ultimately, this technology — although still in its infancy — just might transform the job market. 

Dror Gurevich is the Founder and CEO of Velocity Career Labs™ and the Velocity Network Foundation®.

As part of The Drum’s Globalization Deep Dive, Mischief Maker’s Scott McKenzie argues that global brands can no longer ignore the promise of blockchain.

As autumn descends, it is popular to talk about crypto being in the midst of a new ‘winter’ caused by the fall-out from the market turmoil, as well as some high-profile collapses and hacks.  The situation overall has been sobering for users, challenging for innovators and motivating for regulators.

Lee A. Schneider, Andreina Himy, Wee Ming Choon and Olta Andoni are the co-founders of Owl Explains.

We believe this narrative only scratches the surface of the changes that will be wrought by blockchain and Web3. This is why this week we are launching Owl Explains – a new initiative to explore and explain the new world of blockchain and Web3.

Market downturns and volatility are characteristic of periods of intense innovation in underlying technologies and systems. With the arrival of Web1, the headlines were all about the ‘dotcom’ boom and bust, while behind the scenes, many were working to deliver remarkable innovations straight into the phones in our pockets such as a world map street by street, all the music ever recorded, and instant translations from any language.

Similarly, the Web3 revolution built on blockchain quietly continues despite the hype about crypto. Blockchain databases continue to function, forming the basis for smart contracts, applications and businesses based on the digital uniqueness afforded by the tech. The innovation underway goes far beyond the headlines – often turbocharging peer to peer activity and reclaiming ownership of the digital space that has been so dominated in latest times by powerful intermediaries.

Consider the Lemonade Crypto Climate Coalition, which is bringing weather insurance to farmers in developing countries utilizing public blockchain as the core infrastructure.  Lemonade, a modern insurance company, recognized that traditional insurance tools and methods simply could not serve this market.  So they rethought the system, leveraged the global nature of blockchain and its ability to financially connect anyone around the world, and launched newly designed insurance fit for purpose.  Now insurance against drought will be available anywhere.

Brave offers a browser and search engine that allows users to turn their internet search history into an asset that they can either protect or monetise by trading it for a ‘basic attention token’ (BAT) paid to them by an advertiser that wants to target them. In this new world, the user is no longer ‘the product’ – they are back in control of their own data.

That same user could then spend that BAT token to listen to their favourite artist on Audius, a Web3 music streaming platform that allows musicians to keep a greater share of their earnings by cutting out intermediaries.

Or they could use it to purchase surplus energy from their neighbour’s solar panels through microgrid initiatives like this one in New York.

All of these innovations rely in part on tokenisation, the process of digitising assets through a digitally unique item on a blockchain.  Think of a token as representing a bundle of rights.  In Lemonade’s initiative, those rights might be to an insurance pay-out if your crops are destroyed by drought.  For the BAT, those rights might be closer to a means of exchange of value.  Blockchains like Avalanche bring these bundles of rights into existence and make them transferable everywhere on the planet and very quickly.  On a macro level, tokenisation releases trapped capital, increases productivity and furthers economic inclusion.

And that is where regulators come in.

Currently, responsible players who want to operate within the rules face a patchwork of different and often unclear regulations governing tokens in different territories around the world. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) is a good start in defining and setting rules for various types of tokens.  Other countries, such as Japan, Switzerland and Singapore, continue to develop their regimes but more needs to be done both in the EU and around the world to define and create sensible, consistent regulation to provide the clarity and legal certainty about the core of what tokenization is and how it works.

Policy makers should not stop there.  They should recognize and encourage the change that blockchain and Web3 brings to the way ownership is established and value is transferred.  By adopting policies and incentives that embrace good actors and marginalize bad actors, they will facilitate the next stage of the internet.

The first step towards sensible policies and regulation is understanding the technology, how it works and what it can do. At Owl Explains we will provide practical explainers of the technology itself, such as consensus mechanisms and personal wallets, and its applications, such as NFTs and DeFi, and put forward some foundational principles to shape policy thinking.  We do not plan to do this alone.  By building a ‘parliament’ of owls, we intend to bring the best experts into the conversation about blockchain and Web3.

We will also host regular ‘Hootenanny’ sessions on Twitter Spaces bringing industry and regulators together to talk about progress in the sector, highlight good use cases, and bust some myths. The first of these will be on Wednesday 19^th October at 11 am ET / 4 pm BST / 5 pm CET when we will be discussing ‘Will Web 3 be better than Web2?’ with speakers from industry, the media and the European Commission. Join us by setting a reminder here.

For more information, follow us on Twitter and Linkedin.

© Provided by CoinDesk Henry Foreman, founder of IndigiDAO and program manager at New Mexico Community Capital. (Google/YouTube)

“My tribe is Absentee Shawnee – the tribe of Tecumseh,” says Henry Foreman. “He created his own tribe among tribes, building a larger community. So this is my version of something that’s deep in my history.”

Foreman is the founder of IndigiDAO, a new cryptocurrency education and development project that will be featured at CoinDesk’s IDEAS conference next week.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, Tecumseh traveled widely from the Shawnee’s homeland in the Northeastern U.S., building an intertribal coalition to resist European incursions. That model remains a powerful inspiration for Native Americans and other Indigenous groups.

IndigiDAO is a finalist in CoinDesk's Web3athon. The winners are announced at the I.D.E.A.S. conference October 18 and 19.

IndigiDAO is Foreman’s effort to draw together a similarly scattered group: Indigenous artisans and entrepreneurs. Foreman launched the project as part of his role as program director at New Mexico Community Capital, where his focus is on business, finance, and technology education for aspiring indigenous businesspeople.

Though IndigiDAO has sprawling ambitions, it’s starting with two primary goals. On the one hand, Foreman says entrepreneurs in his community want more education on crypto.

“This is a form of digital financial literacy,” he says. “We want to meet entrepreneurs where they’re at.” IndigiDAO is building a hands-on educational program that starts with basics like setting up wallets, and proceeds to more complex applications and concepts.

At the same time, traditional craftspeople face a concrete problem that blockchain technology could help solve: authentication of handcrafted work, which is often imitated and undercut by non-Native interlopers.

“It’s a big issue – people making fake indigenous art, jewelry, copying designs,” says Foreman. “Our traditional makers aren’t making enough income, aren’t being [properly] valued in the traditional marketplace. They gather the mud from the riverside and hand-fire it. It’s hard for that to compete [on price] against someone who’s buying a pot made in a factory and just painting it.” Issuing non-fungible tokens to authenticate items created by IndigiDAO members could be one way to tackle fakes.

But IndigiDAO wants to do more than solve one market problem. Its mission states it aims to “advance Indigenous core values like collaboration, reciprocity, shared ownership and nourishment-based exchange without exploiting the communities and individuals involved.”

That’s particularly intriguing for Native American tribes, including the Absentee Shawnee, whose members receive basic income-like dividend payments from tribal enterprises such as casinos. Foreman believes a DAO could become a model for helping tribal members use those funds more effectively by coordinating – even among members scattered across wide geographic areas – just as Tecumseh’s coalition did two centuries ago.

“Can you imagine a tribe that adopted a shared governance model?” Foreman asks. “That would be game changing.”

If you look at the top five industries that blockchain developers want to disrupt, streaming video and music will be somewhere on the list.

The core of blockchain-based streaming companies and content-sharing firms like D.Tube, Dlive, and Theta seek to compete with giants like YouTube and Twitch with decentralized networks that give content providers much more freedom from corporate control and censorship.

They take far less revenue, and in many cases, they reward not only creators for producing but users for viewing, reviewing and recommending streamers’ work. There is also a focus on transparent promotion algorithms and tools.

The basics are pretty straightforward — peer-to-peer platforms built on blockchain and using native cryptocurrencies for payments — and some big names have tested the water. In 2020, Dlive brought (since retired) No. 1 YouTuber PewDiePie to its platform for livestreams, bringing the service 2 million new viewers in a month.

Other top platforms include D.Tube, an ad-free sharing service whose tokens can be earned by watching, sharing and commenting on videos as well as by uploading them.

Twitch-targeting Stacked is after the gamer market. It raised $13 million in August for gamer streaming content that pays creators in governance tokens that give them a say in how the platform is run, TechCrunch said.

Theta’s peer-to-peer model incentivizes decentralized hosts to put up the streaming infrastructure in exchange for the same THETA tokens viewers can use to reward creators.

“Our vision is for end-users to see themselves less as consumers of a service, and more as participants in a network that benefits everyone involved,” Wes Levitt, Theta Labs’ head of strategy told CryptoSlate in February. “With more options to distribute video through decentralized networks like Theta, creators can better control their content distribution and retain more earnings.”

Beyond Entertainment

However, there are uses of blockchain streaming video that go beyond sending movies, documentaries, influencer videos and gaming run-throughs.

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Eluvio, a blockchain distribution and monetization company that has partnerships with Fox, MGM Studios and the Black Eyed Peas, among others, is seeing its technology used for more than just getting content in front of the public.

In early 2021, MGM began testing Eluvio Content Fabric for business-oriented applications. One was ROAR Screeners, a secure B2B streaming platform that allowed the entertainment company to host encrypted screenings of films and TV shows for potential buyers.

Another, ROAR Pre-Release focused on pre-release 4K screenings that could be individually watermarked and encrypted, and controlled digital rights management (DRM). ROAR Marketing provided 1.5 million images, TV and movie clips, logos and other content for marketing licensees. And MGM Licensing was a content discovery tool allowing marketers to build their own clips of the studio's content library.

Along with content streaming, Eluvio can create APIs and utility service layers for intermediary companies

“You could think of it like a decentralized SaaS, a service to replace CDNs, clouds, and media stacks and provide native tokenizing features,” Eluvio CEO Michelle Munson told IBC in September. “These kinds of models represent a new wave of what we think of as the windowing of the value of content

Then there’s cost. Doug Petkanics, CEO of decentralized streaming infrastructure provider Livepeer, pointed to the cost of transcoding — converting video to viewable formats like MPEG-4 or MOV that are needed by various platforms — in an interview for Dell’s blog in February.

It can cost as much as $3 per hour when working through providers like Amazon Cloud Services, he said, adding that the “giant technology monopolies that run the live streaming infrastructure charge a price that’s prohibitive to the emerging creator economy.”

Livepeer allows anyone with extra computing power to sign up and earn incremental revenue by providing the encoding on an as-available basis to streaming sites that aren’t as big as Twitch and YouTube — which wrap encoding costs to the steep charges they impose on content creators using their network.

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