Preamble: Blockchain may be one of the tech media’s favorite topics today, thanks in large part to bitcoin’s popularity in 2017. If 2017 was the year of Bitcoin, 2018 could well be the year of the blockchain explosion. As a product manager, I am more concerned about the practical application scenarios of blockchain than the chaotic coin circle and the chain circle that requires technical background.
What is blockchain?
Suppose A needs to transfer some money to B now, he can choose some methods: bank card transfer, Alipay/wechat transfer, etc. But these approaches have a problem with the existing system:
To build trust, we need a third party platform
Such systems may have some problems, such as unstable third-party systems, maliciously tampered records… The emergence of blockchain technology gives a good solution to this problem.
In essence, blockchain is a decentralized distributed database, which does not depend on a central node. All servers involved in the blockchain network participate in the maintenance, and it is difficult to be destroyed unless more than 50% of the nodes are mastered. Therefore, blockchain has high security. At the same time, because blockchain is a chain structure, the data in the new block contains the information of the previous block, and this part of the information becomes unmodifiable. Therefore, blockchain also has the characteristics of information that cannot be tampered with. But in order to control the rate at which blocks are created, it is very difficult to calculate new blocks, so blockchains consume too much energy, which is why bitcoin miners use special mining machines and choose to mine in areas with low electricity prices.
For a more straightforward and detailed explanation of blockchain, you can see this article blockchain Primer, which does not explain too much.
The application of blockchain
At present, the most extensive application of blockchain is various digital currencies led by Bitcoin. But in addition to these chaotic and complex digital currencies, as a product manager, it is more important to focus on what changes blockchain technology can bring to real life. Here are some examples of blockchain applications.
1. Pay
Finance is probably the most centralised industry in the world right now. Without a doubt, one of the benefits of a decentralized currency is the ability to make direct transfer payments without the need for third-party intermediaries like banks, so blockchain could come in handy for cross-border remittances. We can already use blockchain to move money around the world in minutes rather than days, and blockchain offers an excellent solution because its anonymity and immutable data make the transaction of assets more secure.
However, the application of blockchain in payment is restricted by the imperfect standards and relevant laws and regulations in the financial field. Therefore, it is necessary for blockchain technology to provide enterprises, financial participants, regulatory authorities and legislative bodies to cooperate and establish an effective cooperation mechanism.
2. The contract
Using blockchain technology, traditional contracts can be converted into smart contracts. Unlike traditional contracts, smart contracts consist of software code and are executed by a blockchain network. The advantage is that contracts cannot be modified once deployed, ensuring that both parties’ agreements are not involved, and that smart contracts written in code on the blockchain are completely unchangeable once triggered.
At present, there are a number of platforms using blockchain technology in smart contracts, such as CoinFabrik, Fida and so on.
3. The public welfare
Do you still remember the adverse social impact of the Guo Meimei incident at that time? The main reason was that some links in the public welfare process were not transparent, and participants of public welfare activities could not monitor every link in the whole process. Using blockchain technology, the projects, amount and flow of funds of public welfare activities can be stored in the blockchain, and anyone can check them, making public welfare activities more transparent and supervised by the society.
4. The food
As a person with a background in food science, how blockchain can be used in the food industry is also my concern. At present, food safety has been paid more and more attention by more and more people. However, since every link of food is far away from ordinary consumers from the acquisition of raw materials, production, processing, packaging and distribution, we cannot trace every link of food. If producers use inferior food raw materials, or food suppliers tamper with food shelf life information, consumers cannot know the hidden dangers of food safety. Using block chain technology, track on the food supply chain system, from raw material source, to food production, to wholesalers and retailers, each process will be recorded its original identifier, the user can get food after use a mobile phone App to identify the whole process of information, and block chain tamper-resistant ensures the authenticity of the information. Td-food has already established itself in Vietnam, pushing for the disclosure of farm-to-table FOOD traceability in an effort to restructure the FOOD supply.
5. Recreational
With the development of Internet technology, a series of changes have taken place in the entertainment industry from the use of terminal devices, content distribution to commercial profits. However, there are still some problems that have not been well solved, such as the copyright problem that has plagued movies, e-books and digital albums for a long time. With blockchain technology, it is possible to penetrate all parts of this process and harness the power of distributed ledgers to solve this problem. Custos Media, a start-up, uses imperceptible watermarking and blockchain technology to anonymously transform downloaders and uploaders of pirated files to protect digital Media files from online piracy by notifying them when they appear.
Or digital media distribution. We all want the songs we buy on iTunes, or the e-books we buy on Amazon, to work across all media, but at the moment what we buy is more like a copy of a corresponding platform, with no ability to work on other platforms. A company called OPUS is the world’s first decentralized music platform based on ETH (Ethereum) and IPFS (Interplanetary File System). Based on ethereum’s logical layer, it handles all transactions on the Opus network, allowing users to play music on any player wherever they buy it, and for musicians, eliminating a cut of their income from streaming platforms.
6. Cloud storage
At present, cloud computing platforms such as Ali Cloud and Tencent Cloud provide solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises to store data. However, the problem is that once these centralized cloud computing platforms are abnormal or attacked, the files stored in them may be dealt a devastating blow. Using blockchain technology, data can be stored on thousands of node devices across the network, and when retrieval is needed, data can be consolidated from these node devices, thus improving data security.
At present, Nextcloud, an open source cloud technology provider, has withdrawn from decentralized cloud storage services based on blockchain technology, ensuring data security and reducing costs.
Embrace blockchain
At present, blockchain technology may bring a huge change to the information society. Due to its distributed and multi-center characteristics, the most fundamental “credit” problem of human society can be solved. Therefore, industries that may have credit risks, such as financial securities, personal resume, medical care, education and so on, can infiltrate blockchain technology to solve these problems. Each of us is in the midst of this transformation, and the sooner we embrace blockchain, the sooner we see the future.