The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Crypto / fintech

Richard Gendal Brown

gendal.me

Thoughts on the future of finance

Crypto / fintechDistributed systems / cloudEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
77 from 21 Oct 2013 to 27 Nov 2025
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://gendal.me/feed/

2025 1

  1. A simple explanation of the big idea behind public key cryptography

2024 2

  1. “Digital Meat Rations”? This was not the future I dreamed of when I coined the term Central Bank Digital Currency
  2. I integrated AI into a blockchain Digital Currency solution. Here’s what I learned

2022 3

  1. Ten Tips on Becoming a Better Writer
  2. The World Needs a B2B Application Development Platform
  3. Why all the Web3 Hate?

2021 2

  1. Viral Vector Vaccines – More Fun Things I’ve Learned
  2. The mathematics of COVID vaccines

2019 3

  1. A brief history of middleware and why it matters today
  2. Process Improvement and Blockchain: A Payments Example
  3. Busting the Myth of Public Blockchains for Business

2018 5

  1. Corda: Open Source Community Update
  2. Introducing the Corda Technical Advisory Council
  3. Universal Interoperability: Why Enterprise Blockchain Applications Should be Deployed to Shared Networks
  4. What problem are we trying to solve with Corda?
  5. New to Corda? Start here!

2017 8

  1. Not all business blockchain platforms are alike. To succeed they need to reimagine business computing.
  2. Introducing Corda 1.0
  3. What Slack Can Teach Us About Privacy In Enterprise Blockchains
  4. A Simple Explanation of Enterprise Blockchains for Cryptocurrency Experts
  5. Announcing The Corda Public Beta
  6. Corda: Designed For Commerce, Engineered for Deployment
  7. The Corda Way of Thinking
  8. Towards Deeper Collaboration in Distributed Ledgers: Thoughts on Digital Asset’s Global Synchronisation Log

2016 6

  1. Countdown to Corda Open Source
  2. On Distributed Databases and Distributed Ledgers
  3. R3 Corda: What makes it different
  4. Corda: An Introduction
  5. Introducing R3 Corda™: A Distributed Ledger Designed for Financial Services
  6. It’s New Year… Time to change the world

2015 13

  1. Introducing the R3 Technical Leadership Team
  2. Free advice can be valuable… but only if you take it
  3. Brief thoughts on the Bitcoin block size debate
  4. Bitcoin and Blockchain: two revolutions for the price of one?
  5. A Simple Explanation of Balance Sheets (Don’t run away… it’s interesting, really!)
  6. Quick notes on Sidechains “Elements”
  7. Towards a Unified Model for Replicated, Shared Ledgers
  8. Blockchain is where banks have the most obvious opportunity. But you ignore Bitcoin at your peril
  9. How to explain the value of replicated, shared ledgers from first principles
  10. Bitcoin as a Smart Contract Platform
  11. A Central Bank “cryptocurrency”? An interesting idea, but maybe not for the reason we think
  12. A Simple Model for Smart Contracts
  13. Cost? Trust? Something else? What’s the killer-app for Block Chain Technology?

2014 22

  1. A simple model to make sense of the proliferation of distributed ledger, smart contract and cryptocurrency projects
  2. Identity and The Blockchain: Key Questions We Need to Solve
  3. The “Unbundling of Trust”: how to identify good cryptocurrency opportunities?
  4. A simple explanation of Bitcoin “Sidechains”
  5. Cryptocurrency products and services will determine adoption of the currency – not the other way round
  6. “Device Democracy”: IBM’s IoT Paper – Or “on the blockchain, nobody knows you’re a fridge – made real”
  7. A simple explanation of how Apple Pay works (probably): It’s all about tokenization
  8. What happens if Bitcoin mining companies vertically integrate?
  9. A simple explanation of fees in the payment card industry
  10. Think Payment Cards are Insecure? Just Wait Until Push-Payments Hit Primetime…
  11. Why the payment card system works the way it does – and why Bitcoin isn’t going to replace it any time soon
  12. A decentralized securities trading and settlement system is being built hidden in plain sight
  13. Bitcoin Mining: The First Technology Platform That Works because it goes SLOW?
  14. Bitcoin and Bankers: Reflections on a panel discussion
  15. Ripple is hard to understand, but it’s worth making the effort: there’s a deep insight at its core
  16. Welcome to Bitcoin Island
  17. How I explain Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies to new audiences
  18. Bitcoin exchanges are more centralised than traditional exchanges. We can do so much better than this.
  19. What are the future Bitcoin battlegrounds?
  20. We shouldn’t assume that the best technical solutions will prevail: on “push” versus “pull” payments
  21. What is the “irreducible core” of Bitcoin?
  22. A Simple Explanation of How Shares Move Around the Securities Settlement System

2013 12

  1. Why we need to think of Bitcoin as a platform
  2. The world’s first open outcry Bitcoin exchange and what it teaches us about clearing
  3. A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system
  4. On Bubbles and Architecture… or the importance of the letter ‘s’
  5. Decentralised Digital Asset Registers – Mastercoin
  6. Decentralised Digital Asset Registers – Concepts
  7. Watched the video, bought the t-shirt
  8. “A remarkable conceptual and technical achievement”
  9. Where is the power in the mobile payments ecosystem?
  10. Bitcoin: more than a currency
  11. On the blockchain, nobody knows you’re a fridge
  12. Lessons from Bitcoin: Push versus Pull