Benjamin Davis covers three blockchain stories: Movie Coin, a producer's project to cut middlemen from film financing; IBM's push to use blockchain for cross-border shipping to reduce fraud and delays; and crypto bounty hunters who get paid in Bitcoin to catch thieves and find pirated media.
Welcome to cointelegraph's Blockchain News with Benjamin Davis. Today we're going to talk about how blockchain is making its way into Hollywood, the shipping industry and even bounty hunting. It seems as though Hollywood has decided to stop exposing themselves to each other long enough to focus on their second favorite money. Movie Coin is a new project coming from the producer of Birdman, Christopher Woodrow. He hopes to incorporate blockchain technology into the movie business and cut out all the middlemen in Hollywood. In a statement, he said that we're trying to revolutionize the way films are financed. He plans to put together a list stars and experienced directors to create films without the onslaught of Hollywood's many, many sticky fingers. This way, the people involved in the movie will be the ones who profit. And the more successful the movies, the more valuable the movie Coin. To be fair, I think this might just be a way to cut down on traffic in la, since if you cut out all the middlemen in Hollywood, you're basically just left with movie stars and screenwriting baristas. Seems like a lot of movies are about to get a lot more boring. I don't know about you, but in at least half of all cool action movies, something is going on in or around shipping containers. You can hide in them, you can have secret bases in them, you can fill them with zombies or robots. You can fill them with a bunch of drugs. You know, you can walk into them suspiciously looking for drugs and then get shot in the back by some guy you thought was a good guy, but turned out he was a bad guy only because he had a secret place to kill you, like a shipping container. Oh well, you know. Because it seems that there is a new push to create greater transparency and efficiency in the workflow of cross border trading transactions. The IBM VP of Blockchain Solutions, Ramesh Gopinath, turns out to not be much of a movie buff. And he's more concerned with the fact that loads of paper documents lead to many issues such as fraud, human error and inadvertent delays. Many companies, all of whom seemingly with no regard for die hard movie knockoffs, are adopting blockchain technology to help widen the various international trade possibilities by getting rid of the redundant processes and successfully minimizing the costs that usually come with international trade and operations. And I may be overreacting movies, might ignore this entirely and continue to create these types of films. But now I run the risk of sitting next to that annoying friend who every time there is a shipping container turns and says, well, you know, that wouldn't happen because they have blockchain technology now. Yo, this movie's got an inconsistent visual language. Bounty hunters are about to get a whole lot less badass. In the world of blockchain, incentive is the driving force, and bounty hunting has got a lot of incentive. Basically, bounties are now being used to catch cybercriminals. Crypto bounties were originally started by a bunch of fed up bitcoin traders whose bitcoin accounts and emails were being hacked. This led to websites like Bitcoin Bounty Hunter, which were created and offered rewards in bitcoin to people who located the crypto thieves. Now we have media owners who can embed bitcoin into digital media so that when an individual recognizes it as a pirated work on a file sharing site, the bitcoin bounty will be released to the bounty hunter and this eliminates the middleman so the bounty can be paid instantaneously. When the stipulated action of a smart contract is performed according to the rules, the cryptocurrency is released. To be fair, this has to be the least exciting form of bounty hunting ever conceived, but it may turn out to be the most profitable for those who know what they're doing. And to be fair, I kind of love the image of a film crew sitting behind Dog the Bounty Hunter as he just yells at his computer screen all day. I think there might be something there. So this has been our Blockchain News update. If you have seen or excited about any of the places that blockchain is making its way into different industries, please comment below. Let us know the types of things you're excited about and maybe we can talk about them here. And please don't forget to subscribe and Visit us@cointelegraph.com.
