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Glacier Quarterly 3 - 2018

This issue of the Glacier Quarterly focuses on technology and its impact on our industry.  We recently launched our first Artificial Intelligence fund – the Glacier AI Flexible Fund of Funds – which uses machine-learning technologies to address investors’ main concern, that of capital loss.

This issue of the Glacier Quarterly focuses on technology and its impact on our industry.  We recently launched our first Artificial Intelligence fund – the Glacier AI Flexible Fund of Funds – which uses machine-learning technologies to address investors’ main concern, that of capital loss.

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BLOCKCHAIN<br />

The experiment needed some kind of<br />

token to be transferred between the<br />

parties on the network and a way of<br />

getting new tokens into the system.<br />

A simple monetary supply mechanism<br />

was set up and the first tokens were<br />

issued. They needed a name and<br />

because they were digital (bits and<br />

bytes) and were meant to represent<br />

some kind of monetary token (coins)<br />

they were simply called bitcoins.<br />

The transactions were batched to be<br />

processed. These batches were called<br />

blocks of transactions and each block<br />

was linked to the previous block to<br />

create a chain of blocks filled with<br />

transactions. Although the word<br />

blockchain was never used in the<br />

original whitepaper, this chain of blocks<br />

became known as a blockchain.<br />

‘Pizza Day’<br />

The experiment continued for over a<br />

year, with more and more people<br />

becoming interested in this unique<br />

way of transferring tokens. Some<br />

people even started collecting tokens<br />

and building up stores of bitcoins.<br />

Eventually in May 2010, on what is<br />

now known as ‘Pizza Day’, a bitcoin<br />

collector called ‘Laszlo’ offered 10<br />

000 bitcoins to anyone who’d deliver<br />

two pizzas to his house. He was<br />

hungry and even specified a couple of<br />

preferences! (https://bitcointalk.org/<br />

index.php?topic=137.0). Two pizzas<br />

were in fact delivered and from that<br />

moment on, bitcoins had a value. If<br />

10 000 bitcoins could buy you two<br />

pizzas, they were no longer worthless.<br />

Trading starts<br />

More and more people started<br />

participating in this growing<br />

experiment and soon exchanges<br />

were created (or converted) to allow<br />

people to trade bitcoins for fiat<br />

currencies. The most infamous early<br />

bitcoin exchange was the Japan-based<br />

Mt. Gox (Magic: The Gathering Online<br />

Exchange), which was actually an<br />

online card trading platform that was<br />

converted to trade bitcoins.<br />

Human nature soon reared its ugly<br />

head and in 2013 it was discovered<br />

that most of the bitcoins supposedly<br />

held in custody by the Mt Gox exchange<br />

had in fact been stolen. The<br />

price of bitcoin, which had soared to<br />

more than $1 000 per bitcoin, now<br />

dropped to a little over $100.<br />

Ethereum<br />

Around this time a Russian-Canadian<br />

teenager called Vitalik Buterin started<br />

putting together a white paper<br />

describing a new kind of blockchain.<br />

It used many of the concepts of<br />

bitcoin, but where the bitcoin blockchain<br />

was specifically designed<br />

for running a ledger based on a single<br />

token, Buterin wanted to extend<br />

that to provide a platform where<br />

developers could create different<br />

In the not-toodistant<br />

future,<br />

a cross-border<br />

payment won’t<br />

take two or<br />

three days<br />

16

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