Solomon Lederer is not boring.The former Orthodox Jew and computer science Ph.D.was fired from Morgan Stanley after his attempt to create some type of IRL social network on the subway landed him in the Wall Street Journal and now he’s opened what we believe is the country’s first blockchain coworking space.He hopes to eventually run the space as a decentralized autonomous organization, where members vote equally on how it should be managed and operated.“When I first started reading about bitcoin a few years ago, I thought, This is the future,” Lederer said in an interview.“It allows a whole other layer of systems, sort of how the internet itself is a great communication layer, this blockchain thing is creating a new kind of computer, it’s like a computer layer that sits on the internet.” And so he started Coinspace, based in Sunset Park’s Industry City, where people similarly interested in the blockchain can come and work on their projects.Lederer says there are about six full-time members of the space and several more in its orbit.

Lederer allows people to work out of the space for no charge for up to a month, and those who find it works well stay on.Companies there include Coincube, which does automated bitcoin trading, Freemit, which does bitcoin transfers, and Coin.Press, a blockchain-interest publisher.While there are some fintech and blockchain accelerators and incubators, Technical.ly Brooklyn believes that Coinspace is the only true coworking space for blockchains in the country.San Francisco has a bitcoin store, Nakamoto’s at 20Mission, Manhattan has the all-purpose Bitcoin Center, Chicago has incubator Chicago Bitcoin Center and there are a number of blockchain coworking spaces abroad, including the Melbourne Bitcoin Technology Center and something called rPod Coworking Space, in Thailand.But for a true blockchain coworking space, we think Coinspace is it.Lederer’s goal is to operate the space in accordance with the decentralized and non-hierarchical ethos of the blockchain.“The idea of the space is that we operate as a coop,” he explained.

“It’s $225 a month and still denominated in dollars, I know that’s unfortunate.I’m hoping that once we fill up completely it will be self-sufficient and move away from membership cost altogether and we’ll just add up expenses and divvy up among the members.” To this end, Lederer keeps the expenses of the space completely transparent, with an open Google Doc of every expense and where it came from.They even use a Slack plugin that allows members to move Ether tokens to each other.Recently one member bought a fancy new door lock for the space and Lederer sent him about $250 in Ether tokens via the Slackbot.Lederer plans to use the dApp Boardroom as a governance method, where members can vote on decisions on the operations of the space via the blockchain, where the options will be written into the code and proceed automatically after a vote.This type of transparent, automatic and final programming is what’s so appealing to Lederer and to blockchain boosters generally.Lederer explained the promise the platform contains using the example of a lottery: Ethereum is going to have huge implications, even with something like running the lottery.

Right now only the government can run a lottery.Once you have a global computer anyone can access, you can essentially upload your lottery program onto the computer and it can be designed that from all the money sent to it over the week, it will randomly send the money to one person.bitcoin market cap litecoinYou can have this lottery that no one can censor or block.litecoin hashrate droppingA lottery is maybe not an interesting example because it doesn’t do any good for society, but conceptually it’s a good example because everyone can see what the lottery is doing — what the code is doing — and see that it is paying out 99.9 percent of what comes in and the creator is maybe taking a tiny cut.buy bitcoin gox

Everyone else is now benefitting because the government is not taking 50 percent or whatever it takes.It’s really important that you can have a computer system that can have tokens of real value.bitcoin seminar topicCoinspace is happy to have you come down and check it out.bitcoin next halving dayThey host plenty of events, too, if you need to study up on what all this means.bitcoin halving dayBlockchain is among the “next big, transformational technologies” being eyed for use by government in its ongoing quest to provide residents with easy, online access to services and transactions, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) said in an introductory brief released Tuesday, May 16.bitcoin bic

The encrypted digital recording of a transaction or event via a shared “incorruptible” ledger is not currently in common usage among public agencies.bitcoin buzzfeedBut in Blockchains: Moving Digital Government Forward in the States, NASCIO authors forecast change, citing a survey of 19 state CIOs and singling out the state of Illinois, which is analyzing and in various stages of implementing five blockchain pilots, an official confirmed.bitcoin stealing trojanEric Sweden, a NASCIO official and an author of the brief, told Government Technology that blockchain “was not on anyone’s priority” list during the organization’s annual conference in 2016 — but is now “on a very steep acceleration.” The private sector, Sweden said, is getting into blockchain “probably more out of fear of being left behind than anything else,” but as with other technologies, this is driving interest in the public sphere.

Though blockchain isn’t mentioned by name anywhere in NASCIO’s State CIO Top 10 Priorities for 2017, it registered when the company asked CIOs to what extent blockchain technology and economics were on their agendas.Twelve of 19, or 63 percent, said they were investigating blockchains in state government through informal discussions.Five, or 26 percent, said they weren’t discussing blockchain, but one official said his or her agency was engaged in “formal discussions” of blockchain.Another CIO, representing 5 percent of the total, said his or her agency “had adopted blockchain technology in support of some state government services.” “When this arrives on that Top 10 list, that’s going to tell us we’ve got a critical mass here in terms of the number of state CIOS that are considering this as a high priority,” said Sweden, NASCIO program director of enterprise architecture and governance.Agencies weren’t identified by name in the survey, but Sweden said given what’s known about levels of state interest, “it’s probably Illinois” — though the state of Delaware’s Division of Corporations is in the “very early” stages of exploring blockchain.

Illinois is looking at five focused pilots for blockchain, according to Jennifer O’Rourke, business liaison for the Illinois Blockchain Initiative (IBI) which was formally created in November by six state and municipal agencies.Member agencies are the Illinois Pollution Control Board; state departments of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Innovation and Technology, Finance and Professional Regulation, and Insurance; and the Cook County Recorder of Deeds.They first came together informally during the spring and summer of 2016, making it official by year’s end with three goals for blockchain: ensuring thoughtful and light-touch governance as it applies to the technology; supporting building out the ecosystem from an economic development perspective; and promoting government integration of the technology itself.Among its outreach, Illinois has joined a pilot exploring the use of blockchain to transfer property titles that was begun last year by the Cook County Recorder’s office, O’Rourke said.

John Mirkovic, the county’s deputy recorder of deeds, said the agency likes “the idea of making it harder to steal your neighbor’s house” and believes it’s completely legal “to trade property using a blockchain.” “It makes property records a natural fit for a distributed ledger or a blockchain.It’s a chronological timestamp ledger of a chain of events.That’s why it also makes sense for land records because that’s also how land records are kept,” Mirkovic told Government Technology.The state of Illinois also intends to: “If we were going to start the digital octopus of digital identity, it’s most appropriate to do so at the beginning,” said O’Rourke, who is also assistant deputy director for the Illinois Office of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.There's also movement on blockchain from other organizations in the state.On Thursday, May 18, the collaboration catalyst organization Innovate Springfield will host an "iSPI tech talks" event to examine emerging technologies in payments, transactions and modernized governments.

Speakers will include state of Illinois Chief Technology Officer Mike Wons and Mike Redington, director of Disney financial services for The Walt Disney Company.In June, NASCIO plans a webinar on IBI, Sweden said.Also in June, Matthew Roszak, founder of the Chicago Bitcoin Center, said it will relaunch as the Chicago Blockchain Center, centered on programming, education, technical assistance and incubation.The move, he said, is fueled in part by an increasing realization of the technology’s promise.“It’s not a surprise that a lot of finance companies and, quite frankly, government agencies are looking at this as a new operating system for business, government and beyond,” said Roszak, who is chairman and co-founder of Bloq, a blockchain enterprise software company.Agencies and companies, he added, “are really trying to figure out what it means for them in terms of identity models.All those sparks are fantastic for the ecosystem and fantastic for the potential of government to use this technology.” In its brief, NASCIO said blockchain’s “state-of-the-art cryptography” gives it the potential to create “a steadily-growing spreadsheet of records or ‘blocks’ that create an immutable record where each block is “chained” or linked to the previous block.” Authors counseled public agencies to focus at first on “permissioned” pilots restricted to private blockchains with limited users.

“Permissionless or unrestricted blockchains require immense computing power which is not there today.Permissionless blockchains also have a limited scalability,” they wrote.Use cases, NASCIO said in the brief, have state government relevance across property and financial transactions as well as for public and private records and physical access.Authors singled out as examples the managing of voting, property deeds and criminal records, birth and death certificates and health-care records; authenticating academic credentials; and administering tickets, fines and citations.O’Rourke, however, said she sees blockchain applications for state governments as concentrated in “two large buckets”: providing identity and asset registration — documenting the registration of assets and ownership for items such as houses and property, but ultimately pushing the responsibility for one’s identity out to the citizen.That could be accomplished through blockchain, she said, with various “participants” like schools and hospitals attesting to various attributes of one’s identity such as birth and college graduation.

Blockchain also has the potential to enhance state-level cybersecurity efforts, but will most likely change the way people work rather than add or subtract jobs, she said, citing as a similar example the fact that some law firms already require job candidates to have coding experience and characterizing this as an adaptation.Sweden said blockchain will play an important role in cybersecurity processes with respect to identities, but it’s not yet clear what effect it could have on jobs.“I would say anybody in any field has got to be continually considering, ‘How do I update my skills?” he said, portraying it as a “wait-and-see” situation.Blockchain’s encryption methods are generally seen as quite robust, but Sweden warned that the technology isn’t bulletproof and will likely reveal its own vulnerabilities over time.He said it’s unclear whether blockchain’s connection to the cryptocurrency bitcoin — using the sale of a bitcoin fraction as a way to conclusively record a transaction — will count as a strike against it.

He and O’Rourke both pointed out that blockchains could eventually come to use another form of currency as a financial attribute to the transaction’s tokenization.“We’re watching an evolution of that, but we can’t get away from the fact that bitcoin has been around the longest,” O’Rourke said, noting its value has also increased.“There’s a variety of very good things to be said about this particular cryptocurrency and the value that underlies it.” The bottom line for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, she said, is that they’re coming to the fore, fueled in part by their potential to resolve two persistent problems that have dogged authorities since the dawn of the Internet: establishing identity and creating trust in cyberspace.Mirkovic agreed blockchain may have a bright future in Illinois — depending, of course, upon a variety of factors including the outcome of Cook County’s pilot, which is expected later this year with the actual sale recording of an apartment house using blockchain.