They then work with the key parties within the diamond industry from miners, diamond merchants and exchanges to define and log the ownership of those diamonds, where they have come from, and where they go when sold.

contracts within International Trade Finance. There are consortia of international banks currently looking at ways of replacing the highly paper-intensive and manual process associated with International Trade Finance.

Many applications are still proofs of concept and pilots, rather than commercially viable solutions.

even for those with the most basic mobile technology. For us in the west, the pain points are markedly less and provide us with less of an urgency for change. The Blockchain, however, can transform banking

Be aware there are malware programmes out there that are hunting for your private keys, and if you are connected to the internet, these programmes have the capability, in theory at least, to find and steal your private keys.

So, whatever industry you are in, by checking out Coindesk’s Bitcoin Venture Investments updates and the Blockchain Angels database, you can get a feel for where the technology is heading. By following where start-ups are creating their ideas and where the money is being invested will enable you to get a feel for where the activity is beginning to

Once the infrastructure is built, subsequent application layers can be built on top. For example, web browsers were built on top of the initial internet protocols.

Thus, we have to question the robustness of the technology, its applications, its propensity to have bugs, and its susceptibility to security flaws.

The most interesting part of this reduction is that the banking infrastructure responsible for the change has not come from the Banking Sector. Instead, the Telecommunications Sector has driven