10 Industries The Blockchain Will Disrupt Soon
It’s getting harder to ignore the fact that blockchain is on the rise.
Let’s pretend you understand it. Blockchain is best known for its association with Bitcoin, but it has many uses for business and different industries from identifying diamonds to tracking pigs.
Blockchain will transform industry in a similar way to the internet. The blockchain will revolutionise supply chains, cut out intermediaries, provide greater transparency and enable distributed data mining. Many experts predict that blockchain technology will be the most disruptive technology since the creation of the internet. The financial industry is already being transformed by the blockchain technology. The blockchain technologies offer improvements in operational efficiencies, cost reduction in transactions and reduced risk.
Read below some examples of how the blockchain will disrupt the underlying business models of many industries.
1. Medicine
One of the challenges hospitals face is the lack of a secure platform to store and share data, and they are often victims of hacking because of outdated infrastructure. Blockchain technology can allow hospitals to safely store data like medical records and share it with authorized professionals or patients. This can improve data security and can even help with accuracy and speed of diagnosis. Gem and Tierion are two companies that are working on disrupting the current healthcare data space.
The opening up of access to large sets of data would also provide new ways to explore provide better services to those that need it. Another trend that fits in with Healthcare is the use of smart devices (IoT devices).By the year 2020, it is predicted that IoT inventions will result in a digital healthcare market of $117 billion, bringing to the table a plethora of inventions that will revolutionise the industry and save millions of dollars.
Patients will soon be able to use “advanced wearable devices” solely for at-home use that automatically sends data to a healthcare provider These devices will be systematically updated and linked to blockchain technology to store records and data recorded for analysis.
A further opportunity would be the management of inventory which is vital to the functioning of a hospital. Inventory control would be completely transformed by the IoT and blockchain. Medications and a host of assets could be tracked. Healthcare is one of the industries blockchain will disrupt.
2. Government
Government systems are often slow, opaque, and prone to corruption. Implementing blockchain-based systems can significantly reduce bureaucracy and increase security, efficiency, and transparency of government operations. Dubai, for example, is aiming to put all its government documents on the blockchain by 2020.
3. Voting
Probably one of the most important areas of society that the blockchain will disrupt is voting. The 2016 US election is not the first time certain parties were accused of rigging election results. Blockchain technology can be used for voter registration and identity verification, and electronic vote counting to ensure that only legitimate votes are counted, and no votes are changed or removed.
Creating an immutable, publicly-viewable ledger of recorded votes would be a massive step toward making elections more fair and democratic. Democracy Earth and Follow My Vote are two startups aiming to disrupt democracy itself through creating blockchain-based online voting systems for governments.
4. Music
The music industry is another one of the many industries that blockchain will disrupt. Spotify acquired blockchain startup Mediachain to solve music’s attribution problem. As explains in a blog post,
The problem with attribution is a shared data layer, which is key to solving attribution, empowering creators and rights owners, and enabling a more efficient and sustainable model for creativity online.
The music industry is worth $15 Billion, which leaves a lot of scope for scaling new and innovative solutions. Other startups leveraging blockchain to change how music will be distributed and shared and how royalties will be paid.
Startups Peertracks, Ujo Music and Mycelia are building blockchain-based solutions for artists to directly sell their music to fans without the need for a record label or third-party distributor, creating a fairer music industry in which artists are directly remunerated for their work and able to develop closer relationships with their listeners.
5. Real Estate
Some of the issues in buying and selling real estate are bureaucracy, lack of transparency, fraud, and mistakes in public records. Using blockchain technology can speed up transactions by reducing the need for paper-based record keeping. It can also help with tracking, verifying ownership, ensuring accuracy of documents, and transferring property deeds. Ubitquity, is a blockchain-secured platform for real estate record-keeping that is an alternative for legacy paper based systems.
6. Insurance
The global insurance market is based on trust management. The blockchain is a new way of managing trust and can be used to verify many types of data in insurance contracts, such as the insured person’s identity. So-called oracles can be used to integrate real-world data with blockchain smart contracts. This technology is very useful for any type of insurance that relies on real-world data, for example crop insurance. Aeternity is one blockchain project that is building tools that are useful in the insurance industry.
7. Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding has become a popular method of fundraising for new startups and projects in recent years. Crowdfunding platforms exist to create trust between project creators and supporters, but they also charge high fees. In blockchain-based crowdfunding, trust is instead created through smart contracts and online reputation systems, which removes the need for a middle-man.
New projects can raise funds by releasing their own tokens that represent value and can later be exchanged for products, services, or cash. Many blockchain startups have now raised millions of dollars through such token sales. Although it’s still early days and the regulatory future or blockchain-based crowdfunding is uncertain, it’s an area that holds a lot of promise.
8. Cyber Security
Despite the blockchain ledger being public, data communications are verified and encrypted using advanced encoding techniques when sent out. This way the recipient is assured of the data’s integrity and the data is less susceptible to intercepts. By eliminating the need for human intermediaries, blockchain technology is believed to be more efficient than any other legacy system when used in the cyber security space.
9. Banking
Banks can utilise blockchain technology to make business operations more efficient, faster and secure. Barclays and UBS, for example, are researching ways to use blockchain technology to reduce mid-level management costs. As part of a growing trend, banks are increasingly investing in blockchain startups and working on blockchain projects. R3CEV, a distributed database technology firm, has the backing of a consortium of over 50 banks as it tries to design blockchain enabled solutions, for the banking sector.
10. Cloud Storage
Companies that offer cloud storage services store their customer’s data in centralized servers, which are vulnerable to breaches and data loss due to operational or human errors. On the other hand, cloud storage solutions that incorporate blockchain technology are less exposed to attacks that may cause system outages or loss of data.
Storj is an example of a blockchain based, end-to-end encrypted, cloud storage network that is secure and cheaper for cloud-based transactions. Users on the Storj network are also able to rent out any remaining digital storage space to other parties for a fee. Hence, opening up a new market for crowdsourced cloud storage.
This is just a small sample of the potential uses for Blockchain. As the Internet of Things continues to evolve the uses and potential uses for Blockchain will expand as well.
Waiting the world will change…
Thank you so much for taking some time to read this story!
Daria Chuiko — writer, journalist,ideas generator of a Digital Nomad Magazine.
Digital Nomad Magazine is a Coliving Club project with an aim to bring fresh and interesting stories to the #travelers #doers #hustlers #founders #destinycrafters
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