I subscribe to several technology websites that send out daily or weekly tech news digests.
For blockchain news, I subscribe to http://www.the-blockchain.com/
There are many blockchain educational videos on YouTube. Some are geek speak for industry professionals, not meant for a non-technical audience.
Beware of the agendas behind the videos, pushing products, cryptocurrencies, or political visions. Look at the website to read about the company that made the video and the principals of the firm.
Blockchain is evolving and there are competing technologies. Bitcoin is the most well known cryptocurrency using blockchain.
Notaries do not have to understand how it works, but it is useful to be aware of how the technology can create tamper proof documents. Multiple encrypted copies are stored in different locations (distributed ledger) so a consensus comparison may be used to determine if one copy has been damaged or altered.
Many of the technical gurus do not seem to understand the role of a notary public and mistakenly make claims about blockchain replacing notaries. A notary is a human public official and cannot be computer software.
To make things more confusing, in computer architecture, they also use the term notary. But they are referring to a computer (notary server or cybernotary) that verifies the validity and integrity of an electronic document by doing a hash calculation of the content and time stamp. When a document is created, a unique hash value is stored with the file. The document file can be processed sometime later and the hash value again computed. If the newly computed hash value does not match the stored hash value, the document has been damaged or altered and is rejected.
A notary entrepreneur can look for blockchain business opportunities to create market differentiation and first mover advantage.
Blockchain marketplace OpenBazaar uses "notaries" (neutral arbitrators) to settle payment disputes between buyers and sellers. eBay provides a dispute resolution service on their paid centralized marketplace platform. OpenBazaar is free and decentralized, so they use a different dispute resolution service. The "notary" receives a transaction amount percentage fee for their service. |
