Will The Blockchain change us forever?

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Coinmonks

8 min readFeb 26, 2022

I am always at war with buzzwords and Blockchain seems to be one hottest one out their right now after artificial intelligence but unlike movie portrays AI, we actually know little to nothing about blockchain except some crypto like Bitcoin and Ethereum. I tried to ignore this at first but as a soul of software developer I was drawn to what all this fuss is about. So, in this article I would like to highlight what is this technology, its usage and future impact that we might have because of this technology and who can block this technology. As always I will try to explain as easy as possible so everyone can at least get idea about what this is? And I will go in same order as I mentioned just above.

So, What is Blockchain??

This is the most important question to answer in this blog post so we all can understand the implications of this technology. Blockchain is nothing but distributed database!! Well, what does that mean? In simplest terms, it is log book where everyone can read and few can write. Let me explain, lets say that I am residing in the USA and I want to send money to someone in India. What’s the way I can do it ? Lets assume you are doing wire transfer. You have account in Bank of America(bofa) and you want to send money to your father who resides in India and has a bank account in State Bank of India(SBI).

How this is going to be done?

I am assuming we are living in era before computers. So, when I am trying to send money through my bank to my fathers account this is what’s gonna happen. My bank has a book where it tries to keep records of my transaction. So, it is checking my statement today and says yes Piyush has 500 USD, so he can send money to India. So, they are going to call someone(Let’s say person X) in India and basically say that Piyush wants to send money to his father and it is green flag from our end as we checked in our book that he has enough money.

Person X happened to know a guy in SBI and says that hey SBI Piyush has debited 500 USD from his account please give his father 35000(considering 1 USD = 70 Rupees). So SBI will check its book and find Piyush’s father account number and will deposit 35000. This is the basic process of how it is done. This is a great process but has its drawbacks like…

It takes 2–3 business days to reflect money to his father’s account.
What if one of the bank goes rouge, your money is jeopardized.
What if the information delivered by person X is wrong, you lost money.
This companies takes their own cut in order to provide money, so even though you sent 500 USD, you are going to get 32000 in our analogy.
What if their is riot in your city, then the service is interrupted and you cant send money.

These are again some of the drawbacks but believe me this list is longer than this blog. So, then why are we using this old system if it is insufficient? Even though I have listed the drawbacks this system prevails because we have faith in money. Dollar is dollar and Rupee is Rupee and that is not going to change. My 1 dollar has a value because you are going to accept that dollar in order to deliver your services. But why banks should have this much power over you??

Take an example of 2008 Financial crisis and its impact. Classic example of bunch of bankers screwed the whole financial system and at the end of day you lost your house, job, money and they got more rich. Once this happens, thousands of families becomes homeless and bunch of people goes under poverty line. My point is we can not trust banker as they have huge cash flow to fluctuate what happens to your money. But do we have an option? Enter the crypto currency.

Please, please read this: Crypto is not blockchain. Blockchain is technology that enables crypto, so crypto is one of the use case and blockchain is a technology but I am taking an example of crypto because it is by far the most popular use of blockchain.

Let’s roll back to our example and consider this: Your money has a value because you have faith in your government that when the sun rises tomorrow your dollar is still a dollar, but not necessarily. We have seen example of countries like Venezuela. If you don’t believe please look at this chart. People were giving a basket of money just to get bottle of water. So, your trust in money is dependent on your government still being there for you and believe me it is totally possible that your government can trickle down like house of cards in a night.

a baby diaper for a pile of cash and crash of currency.

So, enough of problems, lets talk about solution. Enter the crypto. What is it? Your transaction for sending money happened because both banks validated necessary things in my example. Bofa checked whether I have enough money to send and SBI directed my money to proper account number. What if this is done over the internet and computers connected to each other agree that I have enough money and I can send it to respective account. Well, that solves my problem, right? Now, instead of trusting bank to validate(a few people validating) now I have set of computer checking if I have money or not and direct my money to my father. In this case, we have taken power from bank and relied on thousands of computers to say I have enough money and I can transfer money to my father. So, blockchain is a system where you break power pyramid and rely on network of computers. So, instead I rely on bank to do transaction, I have relied on this computers to do task for me. Technically, you can’t cheat this as you cant have half of the computers in the world to invalidate transaction. Voila!! You have sent money to your father without middleman. Even though your government fails you Internet won’t. Your money is yours and nobody else can touch it, because with your own internet key, you can just open your wallet. It is safe, cheap, fast and super amazing. Even though your state failed you, you are not broke! And as Twitter co-founder says “Internet will have its native currency”.. I hope this holds true.

Why this revolutionary and what it implies?

In example shown, the power is in hands of people and not some banks and government. This idea is revolutionary and changes our way of interacting with each other. This is about ownership of your data, your money, your privacy. Imagine this, every bill your government passes, you can vote. And you decide what should happen with each policy. Current democratic system holds power in hands of 500 politicians who are biased and maybe corrupts, so their decision can be skewed. What if I make an app, where you can vote every issue from making roads to passing sewer lines. You know you better than they know you. So, you make a vote and pass a bill. But what about the budget of those roads and you don’t know where it is invested? Well, I have a solution. I make an app, where contactor will upload details of the road every day and you can see weather your tax money is invested right way or no? Boom! No corruption, total power in your phone. What if you want to make a meme and monetize it, please welcome NFTs. Now every time someone uses your meme you make money. What if blogging website where each time your article get an upvote you earn token which you can convert. Blockchain is immutable for the most part, so your data is safe. What about news website where people can actually fact check details and if more than 50% of people say no this is fraudulent that article or video gets deleted. Man!! This is so amazing, and at the end of a day you decide what happens. Isn’t that super exciting, I can go on and on regarding benefits. And this is gonna happen even if you don’t like it… Until and Unless government comes in..

So, WHO IS GOING TO STOP BLOCKCHAIN??

Even though this seems revolutionary, we have seen government somehow trying to chime in this matter and block transaction? China has recently cracked down all alt coins is one of the example. But how this is even possible when things are happening over internet, nobody can block internet right?Well , its complicated!! Government still can see your IP address and they can track you to block you. Indian government also is putting sanction which will allow them to have native control over their own crypto. US government is still holding its stance but it is hard to evade them. One of the most amazing research I see is in project called filecoin which enables you to eliminate big services like AWS who owns almost 50% worlds servers and that way we can go for blockchain but filecoin has a log way to go.

Final Verdict…

I hope you at least got the hang of this idea and what all fuzz is about. Blockchain is totally revolutionary and I don’t doubt that fact and it is as big as late 90’s internet but we have long way to go. As a software developer, who understands worlds through 0’s and 1’s blockchain is definitely happening and it will happen at scale in next 10 years. It’s gonna take lot of effort from my community but I can assure that this will happen before General AI is gonna happen. Web2 has given us amazing things and opened new gates of opportunities for us but this is going to be even bigger and better. Until than Sayonara!!

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Written by Piyush Bhuva