Blockchain For Business

A couple years ago, everyone dismissed my enthusiasm for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, writing me off as a weirdo nerd, asking me why I’m standing in their living room, telling me to get out of their house, saying they don’t even know who I am! Ha! Who’s laughing now?

I think it’s safe to assume that 90% or more of the people I’ve encountered within the community over the past 8 months or so just got into it. When my staunchly conservative father is sending me text messages to tell me that I should be proud of him because he purchased his first stake in Bitcoin, it really makes me question whether or not this is truly a bubble.

Unfortunately for him, he bought 3 years after I first advised him to invest in Bitcoin and also purchased at the BTC’s ATH.

The folks at the Hyperledger Project are blockchain purists. They don’t want their distributed ledger mucked up by cryptocurrency, which I comepletely respect, but that doesn’t discredit the use of cryptocurrencies within the blockchain. The entire purpose for developing such a system is based on game theory in order to provide an incentive for nodes to not only participate, but ensure they act in the best interest of the network. Rewarding the miners or nodes who contribute computing power is a good reason to get involved and the amount of energy required provides a further incentive to play by the rules. This is a pretty awesome system and teams from around the world are also working to apply cryptocurrency to business applications.

Most of these use cases, however, see distributed ledger technology being implemented within private networks where users can assume a certain degree of inherent trust or control. The special thing about blockchain is its ability to largely eliminate the need for trust (remember the Byzantine General’s Problem?) within an inherently adversarial environment. Putting these systems to use within private networks leaves a lot of room for debate concerning the viability of blockchain within most vanilla enterprise operations where some argue that a shared SQL database would provide a much simpler solution that requires far less overhead and development resources.

Either way, this series of articles will attempt to explain some viable use cases within business.

IoT was an easy jumping off point. Of course, I’m only providing a basic, high-level explanation for these technologies within this series. More in-depth articles will also be provided in other areas on this site. Some business use cases that I’ll be covering in my next articles will be supply chain management, property rights, provenance, and finance.

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