WHAT EXACTLY IS BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY? Imagine an election without an electoral board to coordinate and oversee the election process. Or transacting money without going through a bank. Imagine making calls to people directly without having to use a service provider. Seems impossible, no? I mean, where is the middle man? Who governs, directs and oversees the interactions of concerned parties? And what are the rules to play by? Enter Blockchain technology. A transformational kind of technology that processes and stores sensitive information on a variety of computers, instead of just having it all in a single place. With this technology, instead of having all transactional information stored and processed in a bank for example, bits and pieces of each transaction are distributed to a number of users, where they are sufficiently protected from erasure, alteration, and revision using a type of security software called cryptography. In the world of Blockchain, there is a public electronic ledger that is openly shared to users in the network, every transaction created is unchangeable and inerasable, with each record being uniquely identified by a signature and linked to the previous record, thereby creating a chain. Each transaction in the chain is a block, hence the name Blockchain.
WHAT IS ALL THE HYPE ABOUT? The world of tech is abuzz with talk of Blockchain. Everyone wants to know about it and reap the benefits of being an early adapter because despite the technology still being in its early development stages, major firms like IBM, Microsoft, Visa, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart among others, are already looking into ways of putting the technology into use. Some experts are calling it ‘the next big thing after the Internet’, thanks to the success of Bitcoin, the most commonly known application of Blockchain technology.
All pomp and flare aside, extreme caution should be taken when it comes to using this technology, so as to avoid catching the ‘We Apply AI in our products’ disease, where companies just throw in the word ‘AI’, even for applications and products that are not necessarily AI, just for the sheer purpose of gaining clout.
Okay, we know about Bitcoin. Is that all this technology has to offer? Just digital financial transactions? Ginny Rometty, CEO of IBM says, “Anything that you can conceive of as a supply chain, Blockchain can vastly improve its efficiency – it doesn’t matter if it’s people, numbers, data, money.” That is to say that anything in the world of business goes! Until recently, Bitcoin was the only application of Blockchain known. Now, numerous efforts are ongoing all over the world, to apply the transformational technology into a variety of areas so as to improve security and efficiency. Smart digital contracts are now becoming a possibility. They are termed smart because they self-execute, as long as the conditions to be met are programmed into the software. For example, if I have an agreement with a media house that they will pay me $50 when this article is published, all that needs to be done to get the smart contract going is for the conditions, the amount and concerned parties to be programmed into the contract. Once these are met, the contract self-executes and $50 is released and sent to me. Storj, a start-up company, is using Blockchain technology to provide distributed cloud storage, so that you don’t have to entrust your data and information to one single service provider. It also lets users rent out any excess storage