Blockchain proponents say it will revolutionize many industries — again. We’ve seen it before in smartphones, the cloud, and digital disruption. In those revolutions, the tech industry itself was among the first disrupted. Nowadays, what makes blockchain the next big thing is the shift from something with control but not very transparent, to something extremely decentralized and highly transparent.
Traditional ways of doing things, creating value and running business are about to change completely. Blockchain is triggering a massive wave of change in the technology industry — and many others — because the technology records transactions in a way that enables it to automate trusted activity among digitally networked peers.
Should it succeed the way inventors, entrepreneurs, or large institutions envision, blockchain technology has the potential to streamline and accelerate business processes and drive to a new level the efficiency of old business models. Blockchain allows us to create new business sectors and ways to exchange services and increase cybersecurity. It also helps to reduce or eliminate the roles of trusted centralized authorities. As a result, doing business will completely take a new shape.
Blockchain is about to change the way we design business. At the same time, it is about to change the way we build the infrastructure that supports the way we interact, our expectations from our interactions with software, and our ability to use the available tools. Legacy infrastructures are going to be abandoned and investments on IT will have to be recalibrated. Nowadays, we live in the era where we transfer services and products on the cloud. Blockchain will help us to make this transition much more efficient, cost effective, and of course, faster and more reliable and transparent than ever.
Moreover, blockchain becomes the critical factor — along with the cognitive computing–that will drive the IoT evolution from just some million connected devices to the creation of a smart, self-served system with emotional semantics ecosystems. Today, one the biggest questions in the IoT is about the cybersecurity. Blockchain might have the answers to these security-related challenges, since it is based on trust and the safety of the encrypted mechanism and algorithms.
Blockchain’s suitability for the sharing economy would be important, as virtually every industry in the global economy is undergoing digital disruption that will change the value of their asset bases and capabilities. The shift from an asset-owning model to one where multiple involved parties and partners have to cooperate in order to provide the service or the product, is what defines the fundamental value of the blockchain. Moving parts of the ecosystems we try to build could use blockchain’s secure, virtually tamper-proof distributed ledger technology and automation capability to provide the platforms needed to bring sharing economy opportunities to address customers needs and expectations.
Based on the above, regulation has to be adapted, services redesigned, and of course, the way we understand what an ecosystem means must be redefined. Blockchain can be only compared to the changes and world shake-up that the internet caused 20 years ago. We are talking about digital economy, governance, or digital transformation, and blockchain would only help us to enhance the way we perceive the phygital (from physical and digital) world around us, and how we ask, pay, and get paid for services we need or provide.
