Hello Everyone,
I work as a business consultant with a large financial services firm in the US and support their life insurance line of business. Last year my boss asked me to explore block chain to see if there were use cases worthy enough to invest in a proof of technology effort. I had heard of the technology but did not know much except that the value of bitcoin had once soared to over $1,000 and that people could mine using mathematical computing to collect bitcoins corollary to gold mining.
I was pretty excited about this task and jumped right in to see what other insurance carriers were doing to find that there were some pilot projects in the Europe and UK but not so much in the US. Also since it was not that widely adopted and insurance industry being a late adopter of technology, I was not able to develop a business case to justify an investment. Honestly, I myself was not sold on the promises of the technology.
A couple of months back, I was looking for a good book to read and came across Nathan Popper's 'Digital Gold'. It had great reviews so ordered a copy; with every chapter my interest in block chain technology grew. I was fascinated by the stories of the characters that played a huge role in developing the technology and it's evolution as a whole. How so many people had invested so much of their time and energy because of their belief in the potential. The book definitely rekindled my interest, and I plan to stick around this time and continue developing my skills/knowledge in this technology. I also intend to make some investments in cryptocurrency to get some skin in the game.
I look forward to sharing ideas/thoughts with fellow peers to learn this brilliant peer to peer technology!