The Many Ways in Which Blockchain is Changing Our World

The Many Ways in Which Blockchain is Changing Our World

When people hear the world blockchain thrown around the most common thing that comes to mind is Bitcoin. But is Bitcoin blockchain? Well Bitcoin is certainly the first mainstream cryptocurrency to utilize a blockchain for wealth preservation and wealth transference but its not what people are referring to when they mention blockchain.

Blockchain technology is so powerful it has the potential to transform all sorts of different centralized applications and services into transparent decentralized applications and services. Blockchain technology will be applied to fields including finance, healthcare, media, government and all sorts of other sectors, in fact you may not know this but it is being incorporated into these fields every day in all sorts of ways we can hardly imagine.

In this article I will discuss many of the ways blockchain has already been integrated into our world. The development of new and innovative technologies is moving at lightspeed and blockchain technology is being incorporated into modern day business applications at an accelerating rate.

One area in which blockchain is being utilized is in cybersecurity as companies look to capitalize on the technology to create keyless signature systems with the capability of securing health records.

A company called Guardtime is looking to accomplish this task currently to secure the health records of one million Estonian citizens. Securing extremely sensitive information in a decentralized manner has many benefits and allow health care providers to reduce costs by saving them time and expense.

Another company called REMME is basically a decentralized authentication system which is making a sincere effort to replace logins and passwords with SSL certificates stored on a blockchain.

These are just a few of the many ways blockchain is being applied to cybersecurity with many exciting new ventures sure to be coming in 2018 and beyond!

Another field in which blockchain technology has a potential to transform is the global health care industry. For example, one company called Gem is working with the Centre for Disease Control to encrypt disease outbreak data onto a blockchain which will potentially result in more efficient disaster relief and response activities.

Another company called SimplyVital Health is currently developing two health-related blockchain products. The first product is called ConnectingCare, a blockchain that tracks the progress of patients after they leave the hospital. Their other blockchain product is called Health Nexus, which is focused around providing decentralized blockchain patient records.

Finally, one of the most promising blockchain projects I've seen focused around the health care industry is called MedRec.

MedRec is a project that is being developed and managed by MIT to create a blockchain that can securely store electronic medical records while also managing authentication, confidentiality and data sharing.

Another industry which is being transformed by blockchain technology may come to you as no surprise. I'm talking about the financial services industry.

One project I think shows a lot of potential is called Bank Hapoalim. It is essentially a collaboration between the Israeli bank and Microsoft. The project aims to create a blockchain system for managing bank guarantees.

Soon we will be seeing investors looking for blockchain exposure in the stock market. This will be an interesting opportunity to cash in on the new and emerging technology while limiting the potential volatility of investments when compared to cryptocurrency markets.

Another interesting project has been launched by a company called Maersk. Traditionally their business has been described as a shipping and transport consortium but they have recently unveiled plans to launch a blockchain solution for streamlining marine insurance.

The final topic I would like to discuss revolves around how blockchain technology is transforming manufacturing and industrial distribution systems.

One company called Provenance is creating a project to provide a blockchain-based provenance record of transparency within supply chains. This will make it possible to track a product all the way from its raw material inputs to the final consumer and be aware of a product's journey from a to z.

Another company called Jiocoin is a subsidiary of India's biggest conglomerate, Reliance Industries, is currently developing a blockchain-based supply chain logistics platform that will operate alongside its own cryptocurrency, Jiocoin.

One last really promising project is that of STORJ.io which plans to be the first decentralized provider of distributed and encrypted cloud storage. This will allow users to share unused hard drive space and take a dent into popular paid storage services like Google Drive and Amazon AWS.

So when people talk about blockchain they are not necessarily talking about Bitcoin. They may not be even referring to other cryptocurrencies that operate on blockchains. They are most likely referring to the underlying technology that allows for decentralized transferrence of information across time and space. There are many advantages to running a decentralized service as opposed to a centralized one but one of the biggest advantages is free and open access to information with limited risk of corruption.

What do you guys think about the applications discussed in this article? Which fields do you belive blockchain technology will be most successfully implemented in?

Lets get a discussion going about your favorite blockchain projects and how they propose to transform our world!

Thanks for reading.