The Impact of Blockchain Today and Its Value

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You might have heard about “Blockchain” in recent years back especially if you are conversant or have a little understanding of the word “Cryptocurrency.” In this article, you’ll learn about Blockchain, its working principle and how it is used in solving problems today.

What Is Blockchain?

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto the founder of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency introduced Blockchain as the record keeping technology behind Bitcoin (the first successful digital currency). Blockchain from “block” (digital information) and “chain” (public database) is a chain/growing list of records called blocks, i.e., digital information stored in a public database.

The Working Principle of Blockchain

The working process of the Blockchain makes it unique, for some digital information to be added to the Blockchain it has to pass through some processes or steps.

Here are the steps involved on a surface level:

• Firstly, a transaction must occur.
• The transaction must be verified, and the data entries will be thoroughly vetted by a network of thousands of computers spread across the universe; they confirm if the details provided are authentic.
• The transaction is then stored in a block if it’s verified to be authentic.
• Lastly, the block is assigned a hash. The hash is a unique, hard-to-forge code assigned to the verified block’s transactions; after being hashed the block is then added to the Blockchain.

Following these steps, the block gets published on the Blockchain and becomes available for public viewing.

Real Life Applications of Blockchain

Blockchain is reliable when it comes to storing data and handling sensitive transactions especially when they have a high monetary value. Blockchain is applicable in a lot of industries; in this section, you’ll get to learn about how it is being applied across different industries.

You’ll see how it’s applied in the following industries:

• Banking & Finance
• Medicine
• Electioneering
• Property Management

Banking & Finance

Blockchain enables faster and safer financial transactions. Regular banking methods can take more three days for transactions to be processed completely, but the use of Blockchain can cut it down to a couple of minutes.

Blockchain also brings about a decentralized banking system, and the use of cryptocurrencies is proof of this concept. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin have proven to be a credible alternative way of storing money without dependency on a bank to serve as a central authority.

Medicine

In the medical industry, all records are sensitive; from patient data to research information and so on. The use of Blockchain for storing these records introduces a higher layer or level of security, making the records almost impenetrable.

Using Blockchain in medicine brings about increased confidence in the privacy of records and provides some assurance to the patient. Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to gain more ground in the health sector; hence Blockchain will be of higher significance.

Electioneering

Election processes are filled with emotions and sentiments; therefore they can cause an uproar when any sign of an unjust election is exposed. With Blockchain, votes are safer, and the chances of elections being rigged reduce drastically.

Blockchain can be used to aid voting processes, preventing election fraud and boosting the turnout of voters since they know their votes are being stored as blocks in a tamper-proof Blockchain.

Property Management

Property management requires the secure storage of property records, as properties being managed can be worth millions or billions of Dollars. The manual method of storing property records is inefficient as it is costly and time-consuming, so human errors are sometimes inevitable.

With the Blockchain, property owners are rest assured that their property records are safe as the Blockchain is very secure and tamper-proof.

Conclusion

The world has seen technologies come with a lot of hype and leave without having the expected impact; Blockchain is not one of such as it is going to be critical to the storage of all sort of records across different industries in the coming years. Today, Blockchain is already being used in Banking & Finance, Medicine, Electioneering, Property Management, etc.

The impact of Blockchain is gradually becoming more significant, and it’s just a matter of time before all records are based on Blockchain.

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