I&E 550: Innovation and CryptoventuresToday Bytemaster had the opportunity to present a two-hour lecture at the Duke University School of Business in Durham, North Carolina under invitation from Professor Campbell R. Harvey (the guy with the necktie). The forty students taking this course are a mixture of computer science, business, and law majors who are interested in learning about starting entrepreneurial businesses in the crypto industry. The class is divided into eleven teams, each of which is required to develop a crypto business as part of their course objectives.
As you can probably imagine, Dan talked about Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) and how to make them profitable. Among the opportunities he discussed were:
1. Cloning the BitShares block chain using the BitShares Toolkit to produce independent businesses like MUSIC and PLAY.
2. Adding your own business logic like VOTE and DNS to BitShares itself to leverage it's delegates, community, currencies and network effect.
3. Using BitShares User Issued Assets (UIA) to issue regulation compliant shares in a brick and mortar and flesh and blood company.
4. What it takes to add your own Market Pegged Asset (MPA) to BitShares.
5. The opportunity to create a business based on issuing one or more Prediction Market Assets (PMA).
6. Becoming a BitShares Delegate and using that to bootstrap a startup business.
7. Creating supporting business for third party add-ons, services, and products inside the emerging ecosystem.
8. Crowd Funding vs. Crowd Hiring to bootstrap and sustain block chain based businesses.
Unfortunately there are no notes or slides to give you since Dan's lecture was given "off the cuff," but we did record it and hope to publish some or all of his best riffs before long.
For some reason I found Professor Harvey's course reading list particularly interesting, but you should check out all the other resource links on the
course web site as well.
Readings
Andrychowicz, Marcin, Stefan Dziembowski, Daniel Malinowski, Łukasz Mazurek, 2013, Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin.
Antonopoulos, Andreas, 2014. Mastering Bitcoin. [advanced]
Back, Adam, Matt Corallo, Luke Dashjr, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Miller, Andrew Poelstra, Jorge Timón, and Pieter Wuille, 2014, Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains
Fortnow, Lance. 2013. The Golden Ticket. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldwasser, Shaffi and Mihir Bellare, 2008, Lecture Notes on Cryptography. [Advanced]
Grinberg, Reuben. 2011, Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency.
Harvey, Campbell R., 2014a, Cryptofinance.
Harvey, Campbell R., 2014b, Bitcoin Myths and Facts.
Hearn, Mike, 2014. The future of money.
Isaacson, Walter, 2014. The innovators: How a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. [Amazon link]
King, Ritchie S., Sam Williams, David Yanofsky, 2013, By reading this article, you're mining bitcoins. Quartz. [Explains mining process and network architecture]
Larimer, Stan. 2103. Bitcoin and the Three Laws of Robotics.
Nakamoto, Satoshi, 2009. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
Selgin, George. Synthetic Commodity Money.
Szabo, Nick. The idea of smart contracts
Szabo, Nick. Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks.
Perhaps the most amazing thing to me was that a university group of that size and diversity could reach
unanimous consensus on anything. But not a single person in that entire lecture hall expressed one shred of disagreement with Dan's unspoken assertion that dogs are much better than cats.