Experience Extended | Blockchain into Action2021-02-23T14:08:29+05:30

Experience Extended || Blockchain into Action

What does a future with Blockchain look like?

Bitcoin is one of many Blockchain applications. Blockchain technology has made its way through financial services, and many other industries are starting to benefit from it. Tracking products and legal documents, attributing media files, and verifying user identities have all been listed as Blockchain applications. [1]
The wide range of possible Blockchain applications have the potential to bring some transformative changes to society. Let’s look at several key areas.

Electronic Voting Systems

Many electronic voting systems have inherent design issues; for example, a centralized design that means one supplier oversees the code base, the database, and the monitoring tools. Given today’s political climate, it is very important to build and maintain voters’ trust. This is where Blockchain can make a difference; it can function as a secure transaction database, giving visibility to the logging and auditing of votes. [2]
Follow My Vote is one initiative that uses Blockchain technology. Its goal is to “build a secure mobile voting platform that will allow for greater election transparency and increase accessibility to the polls on Election Day”. [3]

Cybersecurity

Today, our lives almost seem dependent on digital devices; from making a bank transaction to ordering a pizza, we spend most of our time surrounded by our smartphones. This has brought a lot of comfort and ease to our lives, but at the same time, it exposes us to much larger security risks.

Thus, strong cybersecurity systems are the demand of the hour. Blockchain can very efficiently fill the gap by providing us the perfect system to protect our digital
lives from external threats. It could create an impenetrable wall between legit users and hackers. Transparent ledgers can store user biometrics, which could ultimately provide password-free data access. Since data will be stored in a decentralized format, it will be present in the form of small blocks, which leave very little vulnerable to hackers. Since all the data entries are visible to every member in the chain, any misadventure can be easily tracked. A cluster of all these features make Blockchain an indispensable technology for cybersecurity.

Preventing Piracy

It has been observed that one of the biggest villains for the entertainment industry is piracy. In the Internet era, a single copy of a movie can be distributed to the entire world with just a click. Blockchain can put an end to this. To draw an analogy, think of Bitcoin; no one can use your bitcoin balance but you, and similarly Blockchain can be leveraged to ensure only the right people get access to the right content. [4] This would be a great milestone for the entertainment industry.

Real Estate

In real estate, land records that date back more than 10-20 years have to be found in massive public logs that are stored in government buildings; this makes finding and tracing land deeds a very complex process. Moreover, it is very inefficient and prone to human error. Blockchain can be a great blessing in this sector, due to its transparent and distributed log system. Any errors that a person made 50 years ago can be easily traced in the Blockchain system.

References

  1. New York Positions as Blockchain Innovation Centre, Finextra.com
  2. Using the Bitcoin Blockchain for secure, independently verifiable, electronic votes by Pierre Noizat
  3. Follow My Vote – A secure mobile voting platform that will allow for greater election transparency and increase accessibility to the polls on Election Day.
  4. 5 Future Uses for Blockchain by Eric Reed
-Authored by Rhydham Gupta, Data Scientist at Absolutdata