In 2018 – from beginning to end – we have been suffocated by conversations echoing the sentiment ‘BlockChain is the next Internet, and we are on the ground floor’. Naturally, if the vocal majority of the tech industry is behind this movement, it probably has some truth to it.
Let’s take a look at why so many people are touting blockchain as the next internet.
Blockchain, at its core, is a tool to bolster authentication.
In this way, blockchain will fundamentally change the way we trust. Trust is
the currency of commerce. If there was no trust, commerce would come to a dead
stop. Trust is driving all transactions that exist today. Human society
manufactures trust in order to drive commerce.
Today, if you wanted to buy a used car and see the record of information before
you buy it. To accomplish that, you would need to see the leger. You would look
and see the previous owners, any accidents it was involved in, maybe you’d see
any major *disclosed* repairs it had. But the problem in today’s society,
whether you are looking up the history of a car, a house, or even a business
that you are buying – things in the leger, the history can be deleted. Just as
someone can add information to that leger, they can take it away.
This is not the case with BlockChain. Blockchain offers a written, documented
chain that has a de-centralized and unable to be tampered with. Because of the
way a blockchain is written, the blockchain leger gives a unique key to each
record using cryptography. Every record is written and stamped by the party
entering it. When the Next record is written, everything from the first record,
including the key is imprinted on that new record are made, along with a new
key. This process is repeated so on and so forth. If someone were to remove a
record, at any part of the leger, the entire record will be very clearly marked
as tampered.
Blockchain creates what is called a distributed immutable leger. This is a tremendous juxtaposition compared to our current centralized, corruptible legers we use in commerce today. When explaining blockchain, I frequently tell people to think of Blockchain as one giant virtual leger that exists simultaneously spanning the entire internet.
Intermediaries, or entities that are 3rd party
middlemen, are used today to create trust. Examples of these are banks, DMV, and
credit unions. Blockchain can completely outmode these intermediaries and
streamline the authentication process.
Long story short: In a blockchain algorithm, there is only one ‘copy’ of each
piece of information. Today, our internet exists creates multiple identical
digital identities. Blockchain utilizes an entire network of users with a known
algorithm working together to create a single chain to verify each unique
digital identity.