Chapter 1: A REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE
While the processes surrounding Bitcoin and certain other Altcoins can be seen as speculative, the blockchain itself is nothing other than a revolution. If you haven’t gotten that yet, you haven’t gotten anything at all.
Following his new book on digital strategy How To Become A Digital Marketing Hero, Rufus Lidman is now translating all his knowledge to the most revolutionary field in the world. A field in desperate need of a digital strategy. In a series of articles, we will get an upclose view of this new mind-blowing market, seen through the eyes of a digital strategist.
The pros & cons of Blockchain
The blockchain is a revolutionary technology that’s been in the works for quite some time and talked about just as long, but only really got a foothold last year. It’s been a bumpy ride getting there, however.
One of the biggest issues being the ecological footprint, Bitcoin transactions running more electricity than every single household in Iceland put together. All the whilst Bitcoin valued at 57 billion USD, is still being spent on illegal activities every year, and that’s despite the fact that many criminals have gone from the easily trackable bitcoin to monero and other similar cryptocurrencies.
Despite these speedbumps, the blockchain fundamentally represents a monumental disruption in nearly every facet of your daily life, along with the rest of the world.
“The tech itself is nothing special, there’s nothing ”magical” about it. It is fundamentally a distributed database with a shared, so called immutable ledger.”
It’s become a saying that the blockchain will do for transactions what the internet did for information (and what social media did for interactions). In comparison to high-end technologies like AI, the tech itself is nothing special, there’s nothing ”magical” about it. It is fundamentally a distributed database with a shared, so called immutable ledger. While that may sound daunting and complicated to some, the function of it is really simple in concept.
Imagine a network of computers, maybe even just one of two computers conducting a complex transaction. Between them and residing on the network, the blockchain holds all the details of said transaction and is accessible to both parties as an immutable ledger charting each step of the transaction — both parties see the same ledger and can thus verify the same information.
Each ”block” in the chain is actually an encrypted virtual record directly linked to the others in the chain with details of some element of the transaction data along with a timestamp. The key element being that each block contains an encrypted hash of the previous block, which, in turn, contains an encrypted hash of the block before that one as well, and so on and so forth. In essence making each block a mirror image of all blocks, making it impossible to change the data of a single block undetected without changing the data of every block in the chain, requiring the collusion of the entire network. One party can thus not trick or cheat the other with absolute certainty as long as the ledger controls the transaction in full.
In application, this system vastly simplifies the ability to track and trace every single transaction on a global scale, material as well as immaterial. Thus, we not only increase efficiency exponentially, but also substantially increase trust in any kind of transaction between any two parties, all over the world.
This question of trust is what, at its’ core, makes blockchain so revolutionary and how it is changing the way we transact and relate to each other. And, by extension, how the entire world operates.
This is the first chapter of my upcoming Blockchain series. Next up I’ll tell you more about the speedbumps down the road and how the dinosaurs have been roaring in fear. Keep a lookout!
