Supply Chain
Blockchain 101
The original concept of time-stamping a digital document can be traced back to 1991. However, the concept was not applied until 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. But Nakamoto's white paper was just the beginning. In 2009, Bitcoin went from concept to reality.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed Bitcoin's original reference implementation. Many people have claimed, or have been claimed, to be Nakamoto. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of Bitcoin up until December 2010.
To explain how a blockchain transaction works, let’s use the example of someone trying to send Bitcoins to another person. To do so, the blockchain must verify that the person has the Bitcoins to send.
In a typical centralized computer system, a user could potentially corrupt or hack the network to fool it into thinking that he has more Bitcoins than he actually has. But it's impossible to corrupt or fool the blockchain because it is entirely decentralized across thousands of computers. In a typical Bitcoin transaction, for example, a majority of the network’s computers must reach a consensus that a user has the Bitcoins to send. The transaction cannot occur until at least 51 percent of the computers on the blockchain agree.
This decentralized fraud-proof transparency is what makes blockchain technology so innovative and revolutionary. It’s powerful because for the first time we can create a way of storing data that no one can tamper with, and that can run completely by itself. There’s no CEO of Bitcoin. It’s all computer code. And those rules, those laws, prevent anyone from tampering with the blockchain.
This ability to store information in a way that everyone can trust and verify without relying on a centralized third-party intermediary has never existed in history. And the possibilities of blockchain applications have only just begun.
Blockchain technology can be used to verify quality control at each step of a product’s supply chain in a way that can’t be faked or retroactively edited. In essence, the blockchain creates an “immutable record” to prove that what was supposed to happen did happen.
The possible future applications of blockchain technology are nearly limitless, which is why the financial world is now fully engaged with this innovation. The blockchain is going to continue to find its way into different areas of our lives the way the internet did in 1995.
A person in 1995 might have thought that the internet would have no bearing on their life. But now in 2021, the internet is intertwined with every aspect of our lives.
You cannot escape the internet. The same will be true of blockchain – except the adoption of blockchain will be much faster. It will not take 25 years.
The ubiquity of mobile smartphones, which is the equivalent of a supercomputer based upon what we had 40 years ago, will accelerate tech adoption of the blockchain – with every smartphone user having a digital wallet and various blockchain-based applications on it.
The adoption of blockchain applications is going to happen much, much faster than what happened with the internet – because, with the internet, we had to build the whole infrastructure that never existed before. Now we have an infrastructure to piggyback off. –NE–