BLOCKCHAIN WATCH 05/22/16

“Time to tap the brakes on the blockchain,” writes bank payment news service PaymentSource, in its daily email of Wed. May 18. Widespread blockchain adoption will take time, according to an MIT panel. Big banks may be getting excited about blockchain and testing its possibilities but ubiquitous adoption of the technology won’t occur in the near future. “The other piece is that there’s a lot of legacy systems” that would need to be migrated or upgraded to adopt blockchain, Simon Peffers, an architect at Intel Corp., said during a blockchain panel at the MIT Sloan CIO Conference. If you’ve heard a lot of about blockchain and bitcoin cryptocurrency in general but still don’t have a clue on how they’re defined, you’re not alone. Blockchain is the technology that manages cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency is a medium of exchange, similar to the dollar. And bitcoin is the best known cryptocurrency. PwC provides more blockchain background in its recently published report.