{"id":90488,"date":"2017-11-27T09:15:54","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T14:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/?p=90488"},"modified":"2017-11-27T20:55:10","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T01:55:10","slug":"power-blockchain-divorce-ipwe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/2017\/11\/27\/power-blockchain-divorce-ipwe\/id=90488\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Blockchain and Divorce\u2014 How We Got to IPwe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blockchain<\/a>Many have missed it \u2013 but not for much longer.\u00a0\u00a0 The financial press is having fun talking about Bitcoin, but another important story that gets less attention is the technology underlying Bitcoin called \u201cblockchain.\u201d There are now books written on what it is and why it\u2019s important and buzz phrases that are created and used to try to keep you out of the crypto club, but allow me to save you weeks of reading.<\/p>\n

Blockchain is simply a new way of keeping electronic records. You might ask \u201cisn\u2019t this just a database?\u201d It is \u2013 it just happens to be a much better database for many applications that is public, highly-secure, decentralized and permanent. There is no single third party that maintains it. What this means is there is no centralized authority (no government, Google or Visa\u2014let\u2019s call them \u201dintermediaries\u201d) that maintains this database.<\/p>\n

With a high-level understanding of what blockchain is, you might ask \u201cwhy is it important?\u201d Blockchain has many implications, but it is going to change how we interact with each other and over time will make peer to peer interaction the norm. Blockchain is going to disrupt the business model for many companies that make their money as intermediaries\u2014and there are lots of them. There is a reason large banks, insurance companies and financial institutions are scrambling \u2013 they are likely to be among the first to feel the impact of blockchain technology\u2014but many other markets, businesses and asset classes will be impacted.<\/p>\n

Background: The Power of the Divorce and Blockchain Become Clear to Me<\/h2>\n

Getting divorced is a miserable slog. Since you have no incentive to do anything financially productive during a divorce, you have time to read, research and plan for what\u2019s next. I was fortunate in that I first heard about blockchain in 2013, and by 2015 I had plenty of time to research and think about this technology. I completely missed the importance of the whole \u201cinternet\u201d thing in the 1990\u2019s, but the more I researched and thought about blockchain, the more I came to believe that this is a transformational technology.\u00a0\u00a0 Now that my divorce is complete and I am less than half the financial man I was before, I can go back to figuring out how to translate this technological epiphany into a financially and socially productive endeavor.<\/p>\n

What to Do<\/h2>\n

If you subscribe to the general thesis and agree we are in the early stages of an impactful technology development, there are couple of things you can do:<\/p>\n

Invest on the Thesis<\/u>:<\/strong><\/em> Identify businesses and industries that are going to be impacted by blockchain and go long, exit and, in a few cases, effectively short them, as there will be winners and losers. The bet is not that we will all be using Bitcoin to buy groceries in early 2018 \u2013 even great technologies take time to gain general acceptance\u2014the bet is that over the next five years how we transact and commercially interact is going to change, particularly where intermediaries are involved. Banks and financial institutions are obvious candidates\u2014but there are many more. Agriculture, auditors, government, legal, logistics, manufacturing, services, transport, venture capital\u2026 are all going to be impacted\u2014in many cases, dramatically.<\/p>\n

You are Not Too Late:<\/strong><\/span><\/em> If you are so inclined, you are not too late and can jump in over the course of 2018. After talking to many people in the space\u2014some of whom have been active for much longer than me\u2014I have found very few people that I would describe as \u201cexperts\u201d or even as highly proficient. I have met many \u201ccrypto millionaires\u201d and they are very interesting people. For the most part, they came in during the \u201cwild west\u201d phase, made a killing and like most technological development cycles, they will be replaced by people who are going to migrate over from more traditional backgrounds. Daily there is a new blockchain \u201cintermediary\u201d that pops up which I find curious given what the technology represents\u2014but they are the physical \u201ceBay Stores\u201d of the early internet era and will soon pass as we all become more familiar with the technology and new solutions enter the market to make things easier.\u00a0\u00a0 Bottom line\u2014you have time. There are plenty of resources to read and in six months or less, you can become as proficient as most of the people that are the \u201cexperts\u201d today. You can even come up with ideas and try to transform an entire industry and asset class\u2026like us \u2026<\/p>\n

Introducing IPwe<\/h2>\n

While tempted to just trade, at some point in 2016, it occurred to me that blockchain could have a massively beneficial impact on the patent industry and patent asset class. I had some positively stupid initial ideas, but by 2017, the crazy ideas started to slow down and the better ones took over. I began assembling the team of programmers, data scientists, communications specialists and patent wonks we would need to implement and create a new business model that intelligently captures the power of blockchain in the patent space. Today, we start to reveal our newest creation: www.IPwe.com<\/a><\/p>\n

We have a team of 20 full time people at IPwe and a diverse group of consultants that are working tirelessly to refine and implement the many solutions we will begin to offer the market starting next month. We have been fortunate to obtain strong financial backing that has permitted us to develop what some are only beginning to contemplate or conceptualize about (you see a lot of this in the space these days\u2014big dreams, little execution and a really nice White Paper). Applying blockchain, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve patents, the industry and the asset class is our mission. It is a curious path how a collection of misfit trolls, geeks and wonks ended up here\u2014but we are going to crush it and make a fortune, improve the patent asset class and benefit the patent ecosystem and society at the same time. We look forward to introducing you to IPwe.<\/p>\n

Erich Spangenberg
\nCo-Founder
\nels@ipwe.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a high-level understanding of what blockchain is, you might ask \u201cwhy is it important?\u201d Blockchain has many implications, but it is going to change how we interact with each other and over time will make peer to peer interaction the norm… It occurred to me that blockchain could have a massively beneficial impact on the patent industry and patent asset class… Applying blockchain, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve patents, the industry and the asset class is our mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109149,"featured_media":82685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6998,228,3],"tags":[13079,9481,14314,9480,14853,33,34],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90488"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipwatchdog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=90488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}