Application of blockchain
There are many application in blockchain, for instance, healthcare, energy industry, stock market, voting, identity management, trad finance.
In healthcare, we can record the data in the blockchain used for traceability of drugs. I used to wonder that if we fake the data upload to blockchain, even the data in blockchain is immutable, blockchain is still not worth to trust. Nevertheless, blockchain’s main advantage is to cooperate with multi-party. We can’t fake the data in another party and ingredient can be traced if you don’t hold the whole supplying chain. Moreover, you should use a centralized system if you own the whole supplying chain.
Meanwhile, using smart contract to control the access right is one of the benefits of blockchain. Patients can fully take control of their health data to prevent privacy leakage. Hospitals can use the data to create a better health treatment. There are more paper mention about combining blockchain, DHT, and MPC for controlling the access right.
In energy industry, blockchain’s multi-party cooperation can also be shown. We will have more renewable energy be generated in every family. It will become harder to trade the energy. Applying blockchain into the grids can make the trading more automatically and can balance the need of power and generation. However, Taiwan doesn’t promote the electric meter, so it still have the cost problem to deal with.
From my perspective, blockchain has a low throughput, while stock market can handle higher one, but it turns out that stock market will need more than three day to complete and finalize all transaction. It won’t be a problem to regulate the stock exchange since blockchain regulate all the stock on it. The problem to apply blockchain on the stock market is that stock market can trade and then regulate which doesn’t cost consumer much time. Applying blockchain on it will waste consumer a lot of time because it regulate and trade in the same time.
Blockchain can also help to management the identity without using the username and password. Furthermore, people won’t need to rewrite all the identity again and again. A individual identity that fully control by the individual is called self-sovereign identity.
Using letter of credit (LC) can mitigate the risk of transaction, yet it become less attractive to the trading parties regarding low-value transaction. Blockchain can model smart contract with all the specified condition in compliance and, therefore, it can guarantee payment. Hoping that blockchain can take over most feature of the traditional bank.
I believe that blockchain will somehow change our lives, though there are many challenge haven’t solved.
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