Is blockchain here to stay?

By entering into several fields such as technology and even the social sector, blockchain has already broadened its approach. It would be interesting to see how long it stays to serve the market.

When it was introduced, it was speculated that blockchain technology is only here to stay with bitcoin. But over the past few years, blockchain has expanded its reach to several other fields, allowing blockchain to stay in technology longer than what was speculated.

Overcoming traditional barriers

In the past, transactions have always needed a trusted third-party to oversee and record transactions, resulting in a certain lack of transparency and a single point of failure if hackers attack.

With the blockchain:

• The need for a third-party trusted source has been made redundant, due to the decentralized nature of the technology.
• Transactions have become more secure, due to the use of cryptography patterns. This has led to a transformation of digital currencies to cryptocurrencies.
• Transactions have become more transparent by making details accessible on a publicly-accessible ledger.

This has led to the toppling of several traditional barriers.

Blockchain is everywhere

Nowadays blockchain is used in various fields.

1.   Voting: The introduction of blockchain in voting has proved to be helpful. Wherever used, it has led to the eradication of political parties tampering with the distribution of votes. The blockchain can totally digitize the process of voting and make it extremely secure since each vote will be secured with encryption using public and private keys.

2.   Banking and Payments: Blockchain in banking has made the entire process decentralized. Decentralizing the process of banking removes intermediaries, thus reducing the cost of transactions and allowing banking customers to save money.

3.   Supply Chain Management: As the blockchain technology gets introduced to Supply Chain Management, the documentation of transactions becomes relatively easy. Secure documentation further leads to a reduction in human mistakes and time delays in SCM.

4.   Charity: A major issue in charity is that of corruption. Blockchain helps in overcoming this barrier decentralizing the system. With the help of blockchain technology, transactions are easy to track and the money reaches where it was meant to, without being stolen in between.

5.   Healthcare: With traditional methods of storing data and medical records, there lies a threat of either data being stolen or damaged. This results in improper knowledge of past illness and a delayed diagnosis of illness. With blockchain technology, a patient’s records can be stored in ledgers and used at the time of an emergency to check what past ailments that patient has undergone and what steps can be taken.

Blockchain technology is now becoming more and more accepted by people worldwide. One reason why it has become so popular is, that it empowers the common man. Despite being misunderstood in the beginning, blockchain has come to a widespread acceptance by people across the globe. I, for one, can definitely say that blockchain is indeed here to stay.