Blockchain Applications In Non-Finance Industries

By Phuong Cao on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Published in

The Dark Side

4 min readSep 23, 2019

Today, I would like to share some key potential uses of blockchain applications in non-finance industries that I’ve summarised.

Identity Management and Digital Identities

Identity management utilizing blockchain technology is a key innovation that could pave the way for the security and foundation of other industries. If you can trust someone is who they claim to be, then you can connect to a range of other applications.

Blockchain technology solves many existing issues with digital identities. Currently, it is relatively easy to set up fake identities or steal someone else’s identity online. Passwords are not secure, and centralized databases are vulnerable to attack. Once a centralized database is attacked, it may provide access to all customer data stored on the system.

Blockchain-base identification systems provide digital signatures using cryptography. There are unique, irrefutable, secure, and almost impossible to duplicate or access without authorization.

Blockchain-based identification is a real possibility in the future with the Estonian government and companies such as ShoCard already building identity systems on the blockchain.

In the future, this could be used for digital Identities, passports, driver’s license, residency permits, birth certifications, marriage certificate, and other forms of identification

Digital Voting

After building the applications that allow digital identities, it’s easy to authenticate someone’s identity for a range of other transactions and actions.

Government elections around the world are facing increasing security threats and concerns over election integrity. Paper ballot voting is still the most common form of voting worldwide. It is the least susceptible to cyberattacks but very susceptible to human error and fraud.

Digital voting is the solution that has failed to be implemented in many countries all over the worlds dues to security risks and privacy concerns.

Estonia, Denmark, and Norway have experienced digital voting; however, only Estonia has successfully run a large scale digital voting.

There are now some projects for digital voting. For example, Federal Elections for State of West Virginia, in 2018, was executed by Voatz.

By using digital voting, a voter could check that his decision was successfully sent, while still keeping their privacy and hiding his identity. Also, digital voting provides a very easy way to access, then make more people join the voting.

Health Care and Medical Records

Blockchain has a lot of potentials for healthcare industries. In reality, you will face the situation that you have to meet many doctors and in many hospitals. Then sometimes, you need to provide the doctor lots of paperwork about your medical history, allergies, and medical questions that you’ve completed much several time.

Storing this information on the blockchain would mean that doctors, hospitals, surgeons and nurses would have a shared database about the patient. They would have the full details of medical records, saving time and assisting them to make a more comprehensive decision on the patient.

The blockchain record of heath would have a list of details metadata which can be health issues, blood type, allergies to certain medicine, emergency for contact for the patient.
The Estonia eHealth authority has been working with blockchain technology company Guardtime to put citizens’ medical data into a secure blockchain database.
The Road Admission Authority of Estonia has been receiving digital medical certificates to ensure a person is fit to drive before renewing their licenses.

Apartment Rentals

Airbnb provides a platform that allowed people to people to rent their apartments to other people in the cities around the world. It removes intermediates (hotels, travel agent), let people transact their house with each other. However, in actual, it only replaces intermediates with another centralized one.

Blockchain-based hotel and apartment rental platform may operate like Airbnb but without intermediates processing all the transactions and bookings.

Property

Property, real estate, and land sales always include lots of paperwork and centralized committee to process the transactions. Blockchain-based property records can contain multiples of metadata like owner, square, location, information of the previous sale activities,…

That will helps users to have clear and correct information about the property that they’re interested in. Also, storing on the blockchain would also help to increase the speed and transparency of property transactions.

Ref: Blockchain: Ultimate guide to understanding blockchain, bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and the future of money — Mark Gates