Thanks - asking me to download telegram - is the tech talk on a different forum? 

Here is a post that I just put up on Steemit related to blockchain and novel insurance applications.  This post includes a link to my recent paper for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners Center for Insurance Policy and Research. 

https://steemit.com/insurance/@ingenesist/are-blockchains-insurable

I look forward to any thoughts or insights. Thank you

Thanks Thom;

Actually, insurance started out as a decentralized "mutual" agreement between independent actors.  Say 10 people each had a small cottage in the woods.  They each had an exact replacement cost of 100 dollars.  Over time, they noticed on average, 1 of the 10 homes burned down due to forest fire.  Each owner needed to have 100 dollars saved up in case their house burned.  This 100 dollars could not be used for investment or buying food.  Therefore, the community had 1000 dollars that was stagnant.  Then one smart guy came along and said, "what if we all throw 10 dollars into the pot an whosever house burns that year.  Now, the community can release 900 dollars into the local economy.  That is the decentralization of risk.

The key is that 1. each house must have the same replacement cost, each house must have the exact probability of being lost by the exact same peril.  3. The probability of the peril must be known and must be the same for all people participating in the pool.  Otherwise, someone is subsidizing someone else in some way.  To solve this problem, reinsurance mutualizes these mutuals in the exact same way.

The problems is not the concept of insurance, it is almost impossible to find pools large enough to with all of these criteria to cover the risks that they face.  So they start diversifying risks, a pool of houses in a flood plain would balance a pool of houses in a fire zone as long as the numbers work.  Or a tornado in the spring can balance blizzards in the winter.   

As you can imagine, and especially with so much money at stake, transparency can get a little thin.  Further, the insurance company does not really care if your house is going to explode settling on the gas line, they only care that the risk is priced correctly.  They have little motivation to eliminate risk.  So yes, there are problems with insurance, but not the problems that you suspect.  These can be corrected with engineers operating on a blockchain. 


 

Abstract: The hallmark of a great society is the ability to capitalize it’s needs, not it’s arbitrage opportunities.  The Highest and Best Use for Blockchain Technology must be to reduce the cost of capital by decentralizing risk, not necessarily money…yet

http://www.ingenesist.com/highest-best-use-blockchain-technology/

This is basically the introduction and conclusion to a 6500 word whitepaper that will be published in the NAIC Quarterly Journal June 2016.  It will also evolve to become a position paper by the NSPE Fintech Task force.  I'd like to make it "bitshares" friendly.  Looking for ideas, comments, or questions.  Thanks.

That sounds promising.  Does it exist?  This seems like a fairly straight forward request - like the first thing that blockchain would have been used for.  So an application should exist, true? 

What about two separate programs; 1. to create the hash and the other, a simple wallet, to load the key?  Does this make sense? 

Thanks

Thank you for posting this.  We are looking for an application that could support an adjudicated factor where a knowledgable person provides a monetary valuation of a physical object, or a delta value added or subtracted from a nominal value.   The market for that physical object would take into consideration the the adjusting value in their offer price.  More specific, this would be akin to a CarFax for Real Estate that includes a physical inspection and ancillary data by a knowledgeable person (adjudicator) who are the multiple writers to the database.  fees are generated by the owner of the property.  database would be viewable by permission or made public.

I heard from Alicia - she mentioned a hang-out Saturday evening.  What's the word on that?  I'm limited in the evening but I'm also earlier than EST. 

Thanks