What is Blockchain and Why Should I Care About It?
The change will be slow before it snowballs and completely overshadows everything we know.
It’s impossible not to have caught the word blockchain online and on TV these days. It is that ubiquitous. However, as popular as it is, not many people know what it is and those who do, only have an idea. For starters, blockchain technology is often solely associated with cryptocurrencies but this is an oversimplification of the numerous applications that it is capable of doing. Cryptocurrency just happens to be the one application that birthed it and made its use popular. In reality, blockchain technology is like the internet and cryptocurrencies are like internet banking, so you see, it is just a tiny bit of the possible applications of blockchain. So, what exactly is blockchain?
A View into the World of Blockchains
I caught up with an expert, Brad to shed some light with his experience. Brad is an accomplished entrepreneur who has been involved in the creation of several companies from inception to maturity over the last two decades. He has crowdfunded hundreds of millions of dollars from thousands of investors in the span of a year at times. He is the cofounder of Blockchain Investors Consortium (BIC) which has more than 2 billion dollars allocated to blockchain and cryptocurrency projects and he has access to extensive deal flow and experience analyzing disruptive technologies. Brad is also the co-founder and Managing Partner of Krowd Mentor, a strategic crowdfunding advisory firm focusing on ICOs, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and token powered organizations. He has several degrees from universities in the US and in France and is very extensively traveled giving talks and speeches at various events.
How Does Blockchain Technology Work?
In the very simplest of terms, blockchain allows us to create a record that is publicly accessible to all the members of the blockchain community (called nodes) and this record once is a permanent one that cannot be revised, only added to or updated. The information added to it are called blocks and the due to the fact that nothing that has been in it previously can be tampered with, the blocks seem to be arranged in a series or chain of blocks, hence the name blockchain.
In the words of an expert, Brad says: “A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked to each other and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a hash as an identifying link to a previous block, a timestamp, and transactional data. Blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the past data and can serve as an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently, verifiably and permanently.”
How Can Blockchain Improve Our Lives?
You may ask: why should I care about blockchain? Well, blockchain is certainly going to change the way we do things. In the beginning, as was the case with the introduction of the internet in the 90s, change will be slow before it snowballs and completely overshadow everything we know.
Brad had this to say: “The same way, the Internet came into our lives in the 90s and slowly started changing the way we live, blockchain technologies are here to define our future. Today most people who use the internet and the underlying technologies do not understand how it works but use it for everything from shopping to healthcare to daily communication in ways which were not possible before. Blockchain can once again drastically change our society and understanding on how it can affect our lives today, which will help us prepare and benefit from the future changes to come.”
The Greatest Advantage of Blockchain
One of the greatest advantages of using blockchain is its inherent adaptability for virtually any use. It is not all that complicated to create a blockchain to specifically cater to the needs of a particular business or organization. This is why blockchain companies are springing up everywhere, both public and private ones trying to create a niche for themselves.
“As more projects that use blockchain are being imagined and built, more sophisticated and complex blockchain models are emerging, so as a technology blockchain is maturing very fast and being customized to individual business and industry’s needs.”, Brad says.
What Does the Future of Blockchain Look Like?
Blockchain is the technology of the future. One of the most attractive things about blockchain is its inbuilt security and also the decentralization and disintermediation of systems/information it offers. Blockchain can be applied virtually to any industry when databases of transactions, balances, trades etc are being kept and maintained. Blockchain will wrest control from institutions and governments and give it to the people directly involved. There will come a time that blockchain will be so intrinsic to the way things are done that it will be taken for granted.
“In the next two to five years, we are going to see projects that use the blockchain without even mentioning it because it is going to be used for the infrastructure of these new businesses.”, Brad concludes.
