Blockchain
Lesson 1: Blockchain Prerequisite (part 1)
Blockchain is a foundational technology: It has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems (Harvard Business Review).
<Postulate one> The first thing to understand about blockchain is that it is not only a technological evolution, rather: blockchain at its core is the convergence of three fields; software, legal and economics.
Remember this, I will refer back to postulate one in the following posts!
The second thing to understand is that different blockchains can exist. And the best way to imagine that is you will have different blockchains for different sectors and core business processes.
Now, the core purpose of a bank is not to manage identity, so if a bank is able to make the process more efficient, as so to save money and (hopefully) invest into providing better services and user experience to their customers they may ‘outsource’ this identity management business process to a third party company (i.e. another blockchain), which has the sole purpose of just identity management.
Lesson 1: Banking Use Case (part 2)
In Lesson 1 we looked at the overarching principle of blockhain being about the convergence of the legal, software and economics fields. In part 2 we will consider a simple use case of opening a bank account.
Simple use case: (implications of ) Opening a Bank Account
- Mo Bloggs goes to the Bank
- Give them proof of ID’s
- (other proofs if you’re a cool international person)
- Approved bank staff verify documents
- Hopefully within the day or up to 5 days you will hopefully be given some sort of account to start saving in (and required for job)
That’s a very simpleton breakdown of what happen’s right now within organisations as stand alone business processes. With me?
Now, if we add the magic *blockchain* dust to this; lets first assume that there is a blockchain just for managing identity. After the bank has verified who you are (step 4), they can publish a certificate to a network of verified organisation to say that this is a legitimate event from a verified bank on the network. This certificate will be published to a public record (ledger) and it will update everyone belonging to this network.
So now if Mo Bloggs goes to another organisation which is on the network and required identity verification to register, he can just share his certificate and instantly open access to those facilities.
In summary, this is a very simplified use case, however, organisations can save heaps of amounts of time on repetitive administration and the consumer can have faster access to services by having a single record of the version of truth. There are many more use cases just around identity, what can you think of?
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