Blockchain is about to change the world.

Claude Fortin
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read
Blockchain is transforming our lives

Blockchain is going to change the world that we are living in, and it is going to change it soon. My advice is that you need to get familiarized with this new technology for your own benefit, so that you become part of the transformation process. This process already started 10 years ago at a slow pace and has been accelerating ever since. In other words, you are already lagging.

At some point soon, the transformation process will hit a vital epidemic point, after which the rules of the current social order will not apply anymore, and humans will have to unlearn what they know, and relearn new ways of living with new processes, and surely new realities.

Now that I have created a sense of urgency for you to know about the blockchain, let me take you through more details.

What is a blockchain?

The easiest way to explain a blockchain is comparing it to a growing list of records, or blocks, which are linked together using cryptography. A block contains a cryptographic unique identifier of the previous block.

Imagine a spreadsheet that cannot be modified, only updated by adding information to it. Now, imagine that this spreadsheet is accessed simultaneously by millions of people, and saved on millions of computers (or nodes). This distribution of data is called a peer-to-peer network that adheres to a protocol that validates new blocks. The advantage of being a node in the network is monetary, by receiving compensation currencies in return. Being hosted by millions of computers simultaneously makes the data accessible to anyone on the internet. The decentralization feature of blockchain and its immunity from being altered, makes it heavily secure with high level of fault tolerance. Thus, a blockchain is featured by its decentralization, openness, permission-lessness, and consensus-based.

The second generation programmable blockchain was launched in 2014, and it allowed users to write sophisticated application for different business uses, like self-pay invoices, or automate dividend payment to owners. Distributed ledgers can also be used to enable the coding of contracts that will only be executed when specified conditions are met.

Now that you got introduced to the blockchain technology, let’s dive deeper into how it will be changing our world.

I invite you to imagine a world with more economic cooperation. Imagine musicians getting the possibility to distribute their music themselves. Imagine municipalities having more effective tools and informational access to better manage traffic in various forms. Imagine a bank speeding up its back-office settlement systems and increasing its efficiency while reducing its operational cost. Finally, imagine big corporations and governments having multiple stakeholders around the world participating in effective online dialogue and decision making.

The biggest achievement of the blockchain is cutting out the middleman. By storing data across its network, the blockchain eliminates the risks that come with data being held centrally, and which hackers can exploit. When you store the data on the blockchain, it is incorruptible.

Shared economies will flourish and will eliminate service providers like Uber and Airbnb. Why depend on Uber when you can enable a decentralized sharing economy where its parties interact directly? Another version of eBay can be a reality, where users interact directly without paying any centralized transaction fees to eBay. Soon, we can have crowdsourced venture capital funds without initiatives like Kickstarter. In the supply chain market, the distributed ledgers can provide an easy way to certify the backstories of the things we are buying, with time-stamping of a date and location, mapping down the process from harvest, to production to distribution. Intellectual property will be better protected in the art and music fields, through peer-to-peer distribution systems. Musicians will be able sell songs directly to audiences, as well as license samples to producers and songwriters, through automated smart contracts, and issue payments in cryptocurrency amounts for those transactions.

One doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out the future directions of markets. Blockchain is not a playground for small players anymore, because the big players have recently joined the game. This is the main reason why things are going to change fast. Entrepreneurs will now incorporate cryptocurrencies into their development strategies, and leverage the opportunities made possible by this invention. By allowing digital information to be distributed but not copied, blockchain technology created a backbone for a new concept of economic cooperation.

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