$414 Billion Alibaba’s Jack Ma: Blockchain Needs to Target Manufacturing Industry
At World AI Conference 2018, Jack Ma, the co-founder and chairman of $414 billion e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, stated that artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT) can all become meaningless if they fail to target the manufacturing industry.

“AI, Blockchain and IoT will be meaningless tech unless they can promote the transformation of the manufacturing industry, and the evolution of the society towards a greener and more inclusive direction,” Ma said.

Why Manufacturing?
The speech Ma provided at World AI Conference was not exclusive to blockchain technology but rather three technologies which most major conglomerates and governments consider to be the building blocks of the fourth industrial revolution.

The manufacturing industry of China alone is valued at around $3.1 trillion, with the US and other major economies operating multi-trillion dollar manufacturing sectors as well.

Over the past decade, especially in the past three years, the industry of smart manufacturing has grown exponentially, as conglomerates have begun to explore various innovative ways to cut back costs and improve the efficiency of the manufacturing process with emerging technologies.

As such, the manufacturing process of most hardware and machineries have drastically changed in recent years, with companies moving towards automation and the usage of robotics to eliminate manual errors and speed up existing operations.

Since the emergence of the concept of applying decentralized systems to a variety of industries in early 2016, many blockchain consortia and development firms have established their focus on utilizing the blockchain to rebuild supply chains.
https://www.ccn.com/414-billion-alibabas-jack-ma-blockchain-needs-to-target-manufacturing-industry/

Citizens of Ukraine will be interested to know that the Ukrainian parliament wants to begin taxing residents' cryptocurrency-related profits.

Lawmakers proposed implementing a 5 percent tax on any cryptocurrency-related profits individuals and commercial entities see. These profits must be reported separately from other forms of income as well, according to the bill.

Further, commercial entities would see their taxation rate jump to 18 percent beginning on Jan. 1, 2024, should the bill pass.

The bill also suggests defining the concept of cryptocurrency within the country's Taxation Code as "a virtual asset in a form of a token, which functions as a mean of exchange or a store of value," as well as defining virtual assets as a "form of a digital record on the distributed ledger that can be used as a mean of exchange, unit of account or a mean of storing value." The bill also explains what  cryptomining is.

The explanatory appendix for the bill notes that Ukraine hosted the early leaders of the mining industry and almost 30 percent of the global mining power, having been a home for the biggest bitcoin mining pool, GHash, at the time.
At one point in 2014, it controlled up to 55 percent of the total bitcoin protocol, raising questions if it could conduct a 51 percent attack, as CoinDesk reported at the time. But later, due to the regulation uncertainty in Ukraine, such companies left the country for friendlier jurisdictions like Canada, Georgia and Finland, the document states, leaving Ukrainians without a prominent money-making tool.

The document added:

    "Given the current state of affairs, Ukrainians are deprived of the opportunity to raise funds and resources to develop their ideas and technologies through traditional instruments. So, last year, Ukrainian companies did not get a single dollar through an IPO (primary public offering) mechanism. At the same time, according to the Ukrainian association UVCA and Deloitte in 2017, 19 Ukrainian start-ups attracted $ 160 million or more than UAH (Ukrainian hryvnia) 4.3 billion through the ICO (the primary token proposal).

As Ukrainian authorities estimated, the country's citizens own cryptocurrencies worth about 98.7 billion in the national currency, or about $3.5 billion, so legalization of the transactions with crypto assets will add at least $45 million in taxes annually in 2019-2024, the document says.