FEATURE
So, What Is Blockchain? Arshit Arora, computer science major and co-developer with Denisolt Shakhbulatov of a blockchain-based news platform, Avaz, explains: “It’s a distributed database. Say you have a roomful of people, and one person says, “Two plus two equals five.” You cannot trust just that one person, but if the majority agrees on something, that’s called a consensus. In a distributed database, you cannot rely on what one computer says, but you rely on the majority of them because they all have the same information and they’re processing it at the same time. When the majority agrees upon the answer, it’s saved, and the computers move on to the next calculation. [The process is] anonymous, but you can see all of the transactions on the public ledger.”
#NYITBlockchain
As the university was gearing up for inauguration events, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was preparing to appear before Congress about his company’s mishandling of personal data. His testimony, and the buzz surrounding it, underscored the necessity for NYIT to incubate thought leadership and thoughtful research. Blockchain is one of the latest “disruptive technologies” to make headlines. And while many people are still confused by how blockchain works, industry leaders are scrambling to Read more about Arora and Shakhbulatov: incorporate the technology into their bit.ly/students-blockchain business practices—beyond bitcoin. “The world is changing again and again, and changing fast,” said President Foley, who wrote about blockchain’s potential use in research in an April op-ed in Scientific American (bit.ly/Foley-Blockchain). “We don’t know where it’s going. That’s both exciting and frightening to all of us.” To help uncover the mystery, NYIT hosted the symposium “Where Blockchain Leads” on April 12 at NYIT Auditorium on Broadway. “[Blockchain] promotes peer-to-peer connections, eliminating the centralized government or banks while cutting costs of the middleman,” said New York Times journalist and author Teddy Wayne in his keynote address at the symposium. While he discussed how blockchain could be used in myriad applications, Wayne also warned about the dangers of investing in overhyped cryptocurrencies, saying, “I would caution to treat it like gambling and not get involved in day-trading in the volatile crypto market, as the profits often accrue to bots or colluding groups and not to individuals.”
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