Friedrich studierte an der Hochschule Aalen internationale Betriebswirtschaftslehre. Danach arbeitete er für verschiedene Unternehmen in Argentinien, USA und Großbritannien.[1] 2001 erlebte er in Argentinien einen Staatsbankrott und dessen Folgen.
Seit 2017 sind die beiden Partner im Geschäft mit Investmentfonds aktiv. Zusammen betreiben sie den „Friedrich & Weik Wertefonds“.[6] Im Oktober 2020 gab Marc Friedrich via Youtube die Gründung einer “neuen Firma” und somit die de Facto Trennung von seinem Geschäftspartner Weik bekannt.[7]
Kapitalfehler: Wie unser Wohlstand vernichtet wird und warum wir ein neues Wirtschaftsdenken brauchen, Eichborn, Köln 2016, ISBN 978-3-8479-0605-6.
Sonst knallt’s!: Warum wir Wirtschaft und Politik radikal neu denken müssen, Eichborn, Köln 2017, ISBN 978-3-8479-0634-6.
Der größte Crash aller Zeiten: Wirtschaft, Politik, Gesellschaft. Wie Sie jetzt noch Ihr Geld schützen können, Eichborn, Köln 2019, ISBN 978-3-8479-0669-8.
No new technology since the dawn of the internet has captured the imagination like blockchain.
Designed to run unregulated electronic currency, the blockchain is promoted by many as having far broader potential in government, identity, voting, corporate administration and healthcare, to name just some of the proposed use cases. But these grand designs misunderstand what blockchain actually does.
Blockchain is certainly important and valuable, as an inspiration for brand new internet protocols and infrastructure. But it’s a lot like the Wright Brothers’ Flyer, the first powered aeroplane. It’s wondrous but impractical.
Not quite eight years ago, in November 2008, a mysterious and still unknown developer going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto launched bitcoin –- the first practical electronic cash that didn’t rely on a digital reserve bank. A decentralised crypto-currency scheme requires global consensus on when someone spends a virtual coin, so she cannot spend it again. Blockchain’s trick is to broadcast every single bitcoin transaction to the whole community, which then in effect votes on the order in which transactions appear. Any attempt to “double spend” (move the same bitcoin twice), or to introduce a counterfeit coin that hasn’t been seen on the network before, is detected and rejected.
With no umpire, the continuous arbitration of blockchain entries requires a massive peer-to-peer network in order to resist distortion or manipulation.
Anyone at all is free to join the blockchain network, as a holder and spender of currency, and/or as a node contributing to the consensus process. The incentive to participate comes in the form of a random reward paid whenever the ledger is settled, which is roughly every 10 minutes. The odds of a node winning the reward go up with the amount of computing power it adds to the network, and so running a node is dubbed bitcoin “mining”.
The only authoritative record of anyone’s bitcoin balance is held on the blockchain. Account holders operate a wallet application, which shows their balance and lets them spend it, moving bitcoin to other accounts. Counter-intuitively, these “wallets” hold no money; all they do is control account holders’ private keys, and provide a user interface to what’s in the blockchain.
In fact bitcoin is entirely ethereal, with not even virtual coins. The Blockchain only records the movement of bitcoin in and out of account holders’ wallets, and calculates virtual balances as the difference between what’s been spent and what’s been paid.
The only way to spend your balance is to use your private key, to digitally sign an instruction to the network, specifying the amount to move, and the address (that is, the public key) of where to move it to. If a private key is lost or destroyed, then the balance associated with that key is frozen forever and can never be spent. Ever.
There has been a string of notorious mishaps where computers or disk drives holding bitcoin wallets have been lost, together with millions of dollars of value they controlled. And predictably, numerous pieces of malicious software have been developed specifically to steal bitcoin private keys and balances.
The enthusiasm for crypto-currency innovation has proven infectious; the feeling is that if blockchain “squared the circle” in payments, then it must have untold powers in other domains.
In particular, many commentators have promoted blockchain for identity management.
The conspicuous thing about proposals to put “identity on the blockchain” is that they overwhelmingly come from blockchain advocates and not identity management experts. What’s missing in the great majority of blockchain-for-identity proposals – and indeed in most of the non-payments use cases – is a careful statement of the problem and proper analysis of why distributed consensus is important.
Blockchain has captured the imagination of people around the world. O’Reilly Conferences/Flickr, CC BY-NC
What the blockchain can’t do
Sadly, when you look closely, the blockchain just doesn’t do what most people seem to think it does. There is nothing “on” the blockchain. All it holds is a record of bitcoin movements and associated metadata. The metaphor of recording anything “on” it belies the need for additional technologies and processes over and above blockchain, to decide how to represent physical items in code and to oversee the assignment of those codes. These necessitate extra key management, registration of ownership, and governance.
Blockchain does nothing about these realities, neither does any other distributed ledger technology that has followed in bitcoin’s wake. Blockchain was expressly designed to manage crypto-currency without any key management or registration. No one is trusted in the naked bitcoin world. No administrator and no third party is needed to vouch for any wallet holder or network node. The lack of friction is great for the unbanked (as well as illicit users) and it also helps build the peer-to-peer network, which must be maintained at a huge scale in order to guard against those untrusted participants conspiring against the system.
And it’s best to remember that the incentive to run blockchain nodes comes from the mining reward. Take bitcoin away from non-payment use cases and it’s unclear who will pay for the infrastructure, and how. The original blockchain is not separable from bitcoin. Now, there is certainly plenty of fresh research and development being done on alternative consensus mechanisms and participation models. But nothing yet is up and running like the established public blockchain, and nothing else has yet been proven with blockchain’s security properties.
Blockchain does just one thing: it establishes the order of entries in a distributed ledger, so as to prevent double spend without an umpire. The truth of the contents of the ledger is an entirely different matter. Blockchain doesn’t magically make the entries themselves trustworthy, let alone the people that created them.
Despite the hype, blockchain is not a “trust protocol”; it’s actually the opposite. Just think about it: it’s not as though paying by bitcoin stops you from being ripped off. For anything of value other than bitcoin to be transacted via the blockchain requires additional layers of agents, third parties and auditors – things that just don’t square with the trust-free architecture.
Lofty claims are made for blockchain’s ability to decentralise all sorts of things. But in truth, blockchain only decentralises the adjudication of the order of entries in a ledger. It is not a general or native “Internet of Value” as claimed by authors like Don and Alex Tapscott. It was expressly designed for electronic cash; it has no native connection to real world assets.
Few businesses have escaped the call to evaluate blockchain technologies. If you’ve been persuaded to have a look, then as a first step, re-examine your security and record keeping needs. Take the time to understand what blockchain does, and all the things it leaves to be done by other systems. If your business is decentralised and your assets are purely digital, then blockchain has a lot to offer, but otherwise, it’s just another database.
There are ways to improve the online ledger blockchain by taking some security notes from banks. If people could use both two-step verification and spending limits on the blockchain, this would reduce any economic loss from cyber attacks and in turn encourage more users.
The blockchain is a global network of computers that run the same blockchain software. Transactions on the blockchain are currently limitless and there is no one governing body. Introducing security measures could demonstrate a level of predictability in the blockchain that could build more trust.
At the moment there are third-party sites that perform transactions with the blockchain on your behalf. They are owned and managed separately from the blockchain itself, and this presents a single point of failure.
These sites, like Kraken, Changelly and Shapeshift, allow people to purchase, as well as exchange, blockchain assets. Activity on these sites includes purchasing Bitcoin with US dollars or exchanging Bitcoin for Ethereum assets.
Current flaws in the system
The blockchain ecosystem is by no means perfect. Many people shy away from using it due to its perceived volatility. There is no “code of conduct” protocol for the blockchain at the moment and it’s likely there never will be.
In addition, creating and maintaining blockchain software is arduous and managed by only a few people globally. These software developers, who are the trailblazers of this technology, are being disadvantaged by constantly being forced to respond to malicious attacks.
There have been many malicious attacks on the blockchain including the very recent attack on a third-party online wallet. In this attack, an unknown user was able to hijack the third-party site and redirect all transactions to their account.
These and other malicious attacks have made blockchain assets either temporarily unavailable or permanently unrecoverable. It’s for these reasons that the solution to secure the blockchain can’t be owned and managed by third-parties, and must be part of the blockchain itself.
Security measures like the ones we’re proposing may reduce the severity and speed of any malicious attacks. Lowering the bounty for malicious attacks could also prove to be a disincentive for this behaviour.
Bank style security for blockchain
The mechanisms we use to build trust in the traditional financial institutions could be coded into the blockchain.
It’s unlikely that a blockchain user will use the technology to spend 100% of the assets in their account, with no notice whatsoever. This is why hacks of these accounts are so obvious, just as they would be if your bank account was suddenly drained.
Adjustable spend and transaction limits currently protect mainstream bank account users from one malicious transaction. There is no reason the same kind of consumer protection cannot apply to cryptocurrency users.
In order for this to work, the blockchain needs to verify that you are the legitimate user of the account, who is wanting to raise and lower spending limits for the purpose of transferring funds.
We propose this could work via voice authentication. This is where a blockchain user performs a transaction on the blockchain and is subsequently prompted to provide a single-use vocal passphrase – this is the second step in the two-step verification process.
This would be similar to the program Captcha, but with one unique twist. Captcha is designed to discern legitimate users of the internet from online robots. It works by generating a one-time image of letters and numbers that the user has to type correctly to proceed. Captcha can verify if you are human, but is unable to verify your individual identity.
Using the human voice with this type of technology could be more commonplace in the future. It’s also less complex than other types of biometric verification, which require sophisticated infrastructure such as retina- and iris-scanning hardware.
More importantly, the human voice shares blockchain attributes. Your voice and your public blockchain key are both public and unique.
At present there is no guarantee of holding blockchain assets without disruption of some kind. Providing security in the blockchain would convert into a degree of predictability in the technology. If this was shown to work in the long term, it would also create trust.
Obviously, we trust traditional currencies. For example, laws provide a promise that a $20 note will result in a mutual exchange of goods and services to that value. So once a degree of predictability is established in a blockchain, there will also be new business opportunities from traditional markets, such as insurance in case of sudden undue economic loss.
It’s in the interests of the majority stakeholders of blockchain to consistently look for responses and improvements that reduce the limitations of the technology. A malicious attack, intent on bringing down the architecture of blockchain technology, would unfairly relegate the blockchain to a history as another ponzi scheme.
The value of one bitcoin recently hit a record high of US$3,025, a staggering rise of over 200% in value this year alone.
Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the New York University, known as Wall Street’s “dean of valuation”, has said that among the younger generation, digital currencies have replaced gold as a choice of investment and that, sooner or later, currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum will compete against nation-state paper currencies.
So could bitcoin become a popular currency and decrease the popularity of euros, dollars, pounds, roubles and others? For anything to be seen as “money” it needs to meet three functions – a store of value, a measure of value and a medium of exchange. Bitcoin’s volatility shows that it is an infant in meeting these three criteria, but has the potential to do so.
However, digital currencies like bitcoin are just one application of the blockchain technology that makes them possible. Blockchain, as the BBC explains, is:
a method of recording data – a digital ledger of transactions, agreements, contracts – anything that needs to be independently recorded and verified as having happened. The big difference is that this ledger isn’t stored in one place, it’s distributed across several, hundreds or even thousands of computers around the world. And everyone in the network can have access to an up-to-date version of the ledger, so it’s very transparent.
Blockchain combines the security of cryptography, the storage and transmission of data in coded form, with peer-to-peer networks to create a shared database of transactions that is trusted, yet controlled by no one.
If blockchain finds uses in various industries we could see a more digitally integrated global economy, something that could enhance economic growth and decrease poverty.
Blockchain technology could make economic transactions around the world more transparent and secure. Shutterstock
Huge potential
In business today, we still require trusted administrators to manage and record the numbers and databases – auditors, supervisory boards and so on. The potential of blockchain is that it offers the chance to “distribute” these digital ledgers to others through a network of computers across the world. It could actually dispense with those businesses that are based on trusted relationships – such as banking, auditing, solicitors, even aspects of government. For example in Sweden, Georgia and Ukraine property registers are being moved on to the blockchain.
In finance, people rarely lend directly to each other, hence the need for banks as trusted go-betweens. The beauty of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or ethereum is that they remove the need for the trusted third party, using instead an encrypted, secure database. This has huge implications for any business that requires the verification of payments and performance of contracts – that is, most businesses.
The beauty of blockchain is that something can be unique and stored digitally with ease, without needing an equivalent in the real world. For example, things like contracts, wills, deeds and share certificates might only require a piece of code stored on the blockchain that represents the exchange. Instead of a trusted intermediary verifying transactions, the computers of the shared network of bitcoin users themselves perform the verification at no cost to those involved in the transaction.
Truth and trust
This verification process holds the seeds of change across huge numbers of industries. The distributed ledger – the blockchain – offers the chance to enhance truth and trust in every system to which it is applied. It can prove who owns what at any given moment. Anything that currently exists to verify contracts, ownership, payments and even performance can be shifted to the blockchain.
This would transfer power away from those who currently manage or verify transactions – a seismic change to the way the world currently operates. As with any power shift, those holding power are reluctant to surrender it. The “winners” in this scenario will come from existing companies rather than start-ups, given that for this new system to work, it requires buy-in and trust – existing brands already have this advantage.
So what are blockchain’s main advantages? By performing the functions of record keepers and managers it would enhance decentralisation, reduce the amount of intermediaries involved and provide an alternative to how value can be stored. Physical as well as digital assets could be uniquely verified online to prove ownership.
As transactions stored on the blockchain could be independently verified and traced, it would be easier to fight crime, counterfeiting and fraud, reducing systemic risk in the financial system. A distributed digital ledger would make it near impossible to change or falsify data, because data would have to be altered across all the related “blocks” in the digital chain, so any tampering would be exposed. Consequently associated costs would fall, enhancing economic growth and prosperity.
In places like India, blockchain could bring access to banking to millions of poor people, helping them to save and plan for their future. Shutterstock
A dramatic disruption is happening already in the financial industry: the world’s largest custodian bank, BNY Mellon, is using a blockchain based platform for government bond settlement. And one of the Bank of England’s research focus areas is based around financial technology or “fintech” and how it affects the way markets and society function.
Another benefit would be to make micropayments possible digitally. A country such as India, where huge number of people still do not have access to banking, could experience profound economic change if brought within their reach, helping them save, borrow and plan for their future.
Taking back our privacy
The online marketing and advertising industry has feasted on data generated by internet users, and social media platforms such as Facebook – with more than two billion users – Google and Amazon collect considerable amounts of individualised data on us to target adverts at us. Blockchain could enhance our online privacy, by allowing us to store our digital footprint on our own unique blockchain and control who has access to it. Rather than these massive organisations building up records of our tastes and preferences, this data would be decentralised and within our own control.
Online privacy would be tightened up with blockchain, as individuals would have secure control over their own personal data. Shutterstock
Blockchain could enhance entrepreneurship in developed and developing countries, breaking down barriers built from embedded bureaucracy and corruption by providing a means to bypass existing power structures. For example, the digital ledger Everledger is tracking a real-life object – diamonds – to prove their provenance and ownership. As a result, trust in the system is enhanced.
When the internet came into being, it was a disruptive, game-changing force for many industries – blockchain technology holds the same potential. In moving trust from the current “verifiers” to a distributed blockchain system, the world could see a massive shift in power to the masses – a truly revolutionary idea.
Bei unseren Handelsrobotern handelt es sich um vollautomatische Handelssysteme, die den DAX Future oder andere Instrumente abwechselnd kaufen und verkaufen.
Mittlerweile können wir mit unseren Robotern alle Anlageklassen wie Aktien (DAX), Anleihen (Bund), Währungen (EURUSD) und Edelmetalle (Gold) abdecken.
Wir betrachten die Installation einer Solaranlage als eine Investition, die durch Stromerzeugung zu einem passiven Einkommen beiträgt. Dabei rechnen wir nur mit den eingesparten Stromkosten, nicht mit einer Vergütung für Stromeinspeisung ins Netz.
Mit der Photovoltaikanlage schichten wir Sichteinlagen oder Spareinlagen bei der Bank in einen realen Sachwert um, der unser Eigentum ist und sich in unserem Besitz befindet.
Bei dem Guthaben auf einer Bank handelt es sich um ein Zahlungsversprechen, das im schlimmsten Fall gebrochen werden kann. Kommt es zu einer großen Versorgungskrise oder einem Bankrun, wird Guthaben nur teilweise oder gar nicht mehr ausgezahlt.
Die folgenden Berechnungen beruhen auf den Verbrauchszahlen 2019/2020 und der Schlussrechnung des Solarteurs für unsere Solaranlage.
Berechnung für eine 5,6 kWp Photovoltaikanlage:
5,6 kWp mit 14 Modulen Trinasolar Vertex S TSM-405 DE09.08
