Real-World Application Of Blockchain

Blockchain application

So you heard about blockchain you call them the internet, you read a few articles or watch a few videos to figure out how it works. And now that you understand that you’re still confused. How can this technology be used in the real world?

Let’s take a few examples, but before we do that, let’s quickly recap what a blockchain is in simple terms. A distributed database that everyone can copy every person with a copy can add new records to this database. Still, they cannot change any record, that’s already in there. This property makes blockchains great to record data transparently because everyone gets to see what’s in it.

So how can it be used? Well, in this video, I’ll give you nine examples. Let’s start with the most obvious and most popular application of blockchains. That is cryptocurrencies when Bitcoin launched in 2008. It allowed people to directly transact with one another without having to trust third parties like banks. Since then, over 1600, different cryptocurrencies have been created. But let’s look beyond cryptocurrencies. Let’s look at how blockchain technology can be used in cars, for example.

Ever heard of odometer fraud by tampering with the odometer someone can make a car appear to be newer and less worn out, resulting in customers paying more than what the car is actually worth. The government tries to counter this, collecting the mileage of cars when they get a safety inspection. But that’s not enough.

Instead, we could replace regular odometers with smart ones connected to the internet and frequently right the car's mileage to a blockchain. This would create a secure and digital certificate for each car. And because we use a blockchain.

No one can tamper with the data, and everyone can look up a vehicle history. In fact, this has already been developed by Bosch IoT lab, and they’re currently testing it on a fleet of 100 cars in Germany and Switzerland.

So blockchains are great at keeping track of things over time. So besides odometers. You can also keep track of things like intellectual property or patents. You can even function as a notary who can confirm and verify signatures on a legal document. Still, we can just as well use a blockchain for that.

The online website stem.io allows you to add documents to the Bitcoin or aetherial blockchain. To add it, you can always prove that you created a document at a certain point in time, much like a notary, although right now blockchains aren’t on the same level as notaries in a legal perspective.

Another interesting application is digital voting. Voting happens either on paper or special computers running proprietary software voting on paper costs a lot of money, and electronic voting has security issues. In recent years, we’ve even seen countries move away from Digital voting and adopting paper again because they fear that your Tronic voting can be tampered with and influenced by hackers. Instead of paper, we could use blockchain to cast and store votes, such as system would be very transparent, as everyone could verify the voting count for themselves. And it would make tampering with it very difficult. The Swiss company, aGora, is already working on such a system and will be completely open-source. But there are many challenges.

First, you have to be able to identify voters without compromising their privacy. Secondly, if you allow people to vote with their own computers or phones, you must consider that those might be infected with malware.

The scientists have proven the voting process. And a final example, a system like this also has to withstand that out of service attacks, because that could render the whole thing unusable. Definitely, a tough nut to crack, but if it becomes a reality, it could make for a more transparent and practical voting system.

Let’s move to yet another example, the food industry. They could use blockchain technologies to track their food products from the moment they’re harvested or made to men they end up in the hands of customers see every year almost half a million people die because of foodborne diseases.

And that’s partly because it takes too long to isolate the food that is causing harm. Blockchains can help us create a digital certificate for each piece of food, proving where it came from, and where it has been so if contamination is detected.

We can trace it back to its roots and instantly notify other people who bought the same bad food batch. Walmart and IBM are currently working on such a system. It’ll trace the origin of a box of mangoes in just two seconds, preparing for days or even weeks with a traditional system, a system like this could be applied to other industries, as well.

We could use it to track valuable products and sell counterfeit goods by allowing anyone to verify whether or not the product comes from the manufacturer you think it does.

Another idea would be to track packages and shipments by using blockchain. That is something that IBM and container shipping giant Myrtus are working on a decentralised ledger to make global trade of goods, a lot more efficient. Alright, so far we’ve looked at ways blockchain can be used to keep track of information and verify its integrity.

But blockchains can be even more powerful when we add smart contracts; these contracts are tiny computer programmes that live on the blockchain and can perform actions when certain conditions are met. Insurance companies could use smart contracts to validate claims and calculate a payout.

Or they could allow us to only pay for car insurance when we’re driving for instance, but it goes even further with smart contracts, we can secure our own data on a blockchain. They could, for instance, allow us to store our medical records on a blockchain. And only allow doctors to access them.

When we approve it with a digital signature, you could store your personal identity on there in the same fashion and choose what data you want to reveal ordering alcohol. A bar, for instance, only requires you to prove that you’re overdue legal drinking age. With smart contracts, you can deliver that proof, without revealing anything else about collecting royalties for artists, a future streaming service could set up two smart contracts, one where users sent a monthly subscription to, and one that keeps track of what the user has listened to at the end of each month.

The smart contract automatically distributes this money to artists, based on how many times their songs have been listened to. So as you can see, blockchain technology can be used in so many different ways. This was just a brief overview of how they can be used, and it’s by no means a complete list of all the applications, that would almost forever to talk about as there’s so much going on in this space.