Think tanks and block chains

June 30th, 2014

Anil Dash:

I teamed up with Kevin McCoy to create monegraph. It’s a system that uses the block chain technology which underpins Bitcoin, but puts it to work in service of artists, so that they can verify that a digital work is an original, with a verifiable provenance. I describe the context of the work in A Bitcoin for Digital Art, my first piece for Medium’s “The Message” collection, and we also showed it off with a demo at the most improbable of venues, TechCrunch‘s Disrupt conference. The response overall has been great, as you can tell from the monegraph tumblr.

This is exciting, an eye-opener, and the type of work you’d expect FAT to produce. Nevertheless, it is clear now that the block chain concept can be put to use onto diverse domains and redefine them.

From Anil’s post I also found out about Data & Society; an NYC-based think/do tank focused on social, cultural, and ethical issues arising from data-centric technological development. Data & Society also contributed to The White House’s Big Data and Privacy Working Group’s review.