How Blockchain Could Change the World
You can count on one hand how many earth-shattering technological innovations have taken place in the last 30 years. Think TCP/IP internet protocal, think mobile computing, think … blockchain technology?
We’ll forgive you if the last one may have escaped your radar. The truth is that if you put 10 people in a room and ask them if they’ve heard of the blockchain, maybe 2 are going to raise their hands. Ask them to clearly explain it, and you might need to find 100 people to get an answer. This fundamental truth doesn’t change the fact that the blockchain, and to a less certain extent, its famous son bitcoin is going to absolutely change the world.
But what exactly is the blockchain, and how is it going to change our lives? In this series, we’re going to have a bit of fun speculating on some great ideas around what the blockchain could come to represent in the next 10 years.
Ok, first, let’s get the nuts and bolts out of the way. What is blockchain?
Think of the blockchain as a bunch of sheets of paper. Each sheet is called a block. The sheet gets filled with information, line by line. Like a ledger. The information could be anything represented by numbers. It could be an amount of currency, it could be a number of people, an amount of Kwh of electricity … anything. Also, anyone can put information onto a sheet of paper (block).
As this is going on, you have these hard working guys lurking around called ‘miners’. Except they’re not ‘guys’ so much as they are computers owned by real guys. A miner’s job is to pick a block (sheet of paper) and to solve a complex math equation unique specifically to that block. There are going to be a whole bunch of miners competing to solve this math problem at the same time. Why, you might ask? Because the first miner to solve the equation wins an amount of bitcoin, and as you might know, bitcoins have value. At the time of writing: roughly $420 USD per bitcoin. This is a way to bring more bitcoin into existence, but more importantly for the purposes of this article, successfully solving the equation closes the block, sealing all the information contained therein and verifying its content all in one wide swoop. That one block is now part of the blockchain, a massively complex series of linked together blocks that has been growing since the very beginning of bitcoin (a story for another day).
So who cares? Why is this blockchain stuff even remotely important, let alone an ‘earth-shattering’ technological innovation? The secret lies in the genius of the blockchain’s makeup.
Blocks are trusted not simply because they exist, but because they are completely transparent; anyone can see what’s on a block.
No single user controls the blockchain; the participants collectively keep the blocks up to date. Finally, if a change is made, it must be reached through democratic consensus, making it next impossible for one person to dictate the rules on the blockchain. This makes for information that’s trustworthy enough for pretty much any application. Are you an international banker that needs to send $1billion to your subsidiary in Japan? Blockchain. Buying a house and need to confirm the transfer of deed in an instant? Blockchain. Remember … anything that can be represented through math can exist on the blockchain.
Excited? You should be. This is going to change how information exists in an age that we have collectively coined ‘the information age’.
