Blockchain 101 and industries

The blockchain does one thing: It replaces third-party trust with mathematical proof that something happened. – Adam Draper

There are no final words on blockchain, and that’s because Blockchain is a new technology, a disruptive one that is becoming a trending topic on tech ecosystem.

I think nowadays the term blockchain is more and more separated from Bitcon, and that’s good, but I want to clarify that Bitcoin is a result of aplying Blockchain technology.

Blockchain basically is the concatenation of unlimited blocks that are inmutable, in other words, we can modify a block inside the chain, we can, basically, only add data.

Each block has its own hash value that is built from its own data. This hash can no be change. When a new block is added, a reference of previous block is created. If a block changes its own main hash value, it won’t match with the previous reference, this will cause the block to be deleted and restored to previous version, inmutable.

Blockchain is based on trust, we want to know that the information is reliable and we don’t need third party system/person to tell us when something is correct or not. Blockchain wants to be clear in a two way binding.

Decentralizing is a key word here and this is because we need to forget about the normal behavior of apps. Centralized applications contains all of its data (database) store in one place (Google, AWS, Own host, etc) with decentralized we have a copy of the data separate in nodes around the globe.

Having this decentralized organization we can ensure our data is secure, using proof-of-work, which is basically get approval of all nodes interacting with the blockchain, same a if some block changes it own hash, the rest of the nodes will get notified and put the block back to the real value/state.

Private vs Public vs Hybrid

There are three different types of blockchain so far, private, public and hybrid.

Public: It’s like Bitcoin, so you can be part of this by only downloading a copy of the blockchain and run it in your computer.

Private: This one is close for only specific parties, like a group of hospitals, institutions, etc.

Hybrid: It’s the combination of public and private. So basically, some components can be for the entire world, like main personal information, but other can be private for specific reasons (medical history for example)

Industries to disrupt with blockchain

This is not a final word yet, and the possibilities and this moment are endless, blockchain is not a stable technology yet and all of the industries I will list are open to different ways and millions of possibilities.

Banking

There are some banks working and experimenting with blockchain for internal process. The majority of them are investing on trade finance with blockchain. The idea is to remove fax, papers and all the untrusted processes.

Security

Since blockchain based its technology on security, it’s almost self-explained how blockchain will impact this area. We can now make sure our data is handle in a good way and always having us as the real owners of that.

Supply chain

From my point of view, this one is the hardest one but the first to be real impacted. Using IoT (internet of thing) we will be able to track all the phases in a supply chain. Check if our fruit is 100% organic or if our coffee is actually with all the standard on the market. Actually, Starbucks is doing some work on that.

There are some other areas We can explore and start working with blockchain. The only true here is that blockchain is here and we may use it to explore new functionalities and new ways to improve the world.

If you have an amazing idea and want to start doing some blockchain, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at sales@4geeks.io.