How blockchain technology can help businesses : Part 1

Blockchain technology has become the hottest buzzword among many in the business world. Though the mania of consumer markets are more inclined towards more glamorous and easy to get into use cases like cruptocurrencies, DeFi and NFTs, the real potential of the the encryption industry lies in the world of supply chain, copyrights and governance.

Unlike most technologies where the business side of the world adopts the latest technologies first and then finds out the consumer use cases, blockchain technology has broken through the curse of this slow step by step adoption. What Satoshi Nakamoto did in 2009 by creating a full scale beast called Bitcoin directly to be used by the everyday users is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the industry has shaped itself. Previously the technologies used to be adopted by military, then governments, then businesses and maybe then these technologies reach the actual users. But in case of blockchain the whole scenario has been disrupted. Everyone has gotten the access to this revolutionary tech at the same time and all are collectively evolving ang finding more and more use-cases of this wonderful technique of encryption.

So no wonder the biggest names in the business world like Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon, IBM are filing patents after patents to gain upper hand over this technology. But many still remain alien to this tech because of the massive mania around the public blockchain blast and the geeky nature of the technology itself.

But as the corporates are slowly getting their heads around blockchain, many new use-cases are arising which were previously just imagined or simply rejected because of the absence of total immutable piece of tech.

Very simply put blockchain tech can be used to prove what information existed at a particular point in time without any doubt of any opaqueness. Hundreds of businesses need continuous auditing because there is lack of trust and massive sources of data are continuously generating more data every single minute. Data auditing has been the key issue for most of the tech giants in the world over the last decade because the general internet which is Web 2.0 does not a function to permanently secure any particular entry.

Initially this data audits were done in the physical world to ensure multiple security checks to ensure the authenticity of the data. But as the world become more interconnected not only it became extremely expensive to audit all the data but over time as we know has become quite impossible to insure data authenticity.

This is where the blockchain tech can lend its hand to the businesses the best way possible. Every data which needs proof or audited can be programmed to be registered as an entry on the blockchain when its gets created in the physical world to create an immutable record in the distributed ledger which is maintained by the blockchain nodes to make sure of the authenticity of the data at the point of creation itself.

The fundamental feature of blockchains of recording every single transaction or entry makes it hard for the parties trying to change the data in the timeframes after the data was created. Even if someone wants to change the data on the blockchain, the technology will create an entry of the change making it very transparent for everyone to see what changes were made to past data. This feature decreases the ability of the malpractitioners to actually hack the system and get away with it. Most of the time, even the most secure systems are hacked and the owners of the data are left high and dry because neither they have any way to catch the culprit nor do they have any chance of reversing the whole process.

Blockchains can provide both the features. It not only helps the owners of the blockchains (let them be organizations or distributed nodes) to see who made changes to the blockchain but also can reverse the whole thing by making a hard fork (Which is kind of like reversing the time itself) to reach back the initial state.

Though the prevalent pop culture around blockchain technology has been dominated by public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, multiple startups and business giants are exploring the possibility of using such effective blockchain technology in the private and more controlled way.

This article is to just familiarize my readers about the basic philosophy of the business blockchain and I will be creating articles on the use-cases in the business scenarios using private blockchains.