Page 6 - March 2018 Disruption Report

CRYPTOCURRENCY FJEABNRUUAARRYY 22001188
...There’s a lot of beta testing going on [with Ethereum] and the insurance industry looks like really the place where this would have the most long-term impact. A huge amount of interest...
There’s an Ethereum ight insurance contract that you can buy so if your ight is delayed two hours it pays over the ether to you into your digital wallet without anyone having to verify this. ...These are really proof of concept at this point. I think in the long run they
may play a really important role, but not until some legal issues are clari ed. It’s possible that you and I could have a smart contract that actually violates consumer protection
law. ...How does this get sorted out in court when a lawyer goes for an injunction, but it’s impossible to shut the contract off and it’s not located in anyone’s jurisdiction. You can imagine in the long run this would make more work for lawyers rather than less because so many novel problems might be created.
RIPPLE
The next [largest cryptocurrency] is probably Ripple. Ripple is a little different than the others. It’s some not a public blockchain so much as a conduit for payments. Ripple has positioned itself as an alternative to the Swift Network for international money transfers. ... [I]f you’re in London and want to send money to your bank account in New York, it’ll take you three days and a 7% fee and you wonder like why so much—it seems unnecessary. Ripple will do it in the blink of an eye for free.
The Swift Network has been notoriously insecure because there are tens of thousands of banks linked into it and the weakest link in the chain is where the thieves enter in and very famously hack the system.
With Ripple, I think the security is the real point of differentiation, but also the speed and cost. So the Swift Network now has been forced to reconsider its own technology. I think competition is very good and probably long overdue. I think the Ripple people were very shrewd to identify this one use case for their coin and to try to build up a critical mass of business, which they have
LITECOIN
Litecoin is a knockoff of Bitcoin. It’s still unclear to people what Litecoin is good for— although you do see more and more people accepting it as payment. Litecoin is easier to mine than Bitcoin and it is blocked four times faster. So in the case of Bitcoin, you have a new block roughly every ten minutes. In the case of Litecoin, the cycle is set to two and a half minutes—so you get quicker con rmation of transactions.
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