Cryptocurrencies are among the most popular topic of discussion for pretty much everyone. Since the initial launch of Bitcoin back in 2009, the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin and thousands of other altcoins slowly started to merge into a lot of aspects of our society. Those aspects may range from simple payment procedures to healthcare and even government, but at the end of the day, the blockchain technology is becoming a necessity in most technologies out there.
Regardless of the blockchain technology’s success, we are still far from full integration with it. In mid-2018 a report from Tech Crunch showed that over 1000 blockchain projects had failed just six months into 2018. That number isn’t too big if we take into consideration the number of overall projects available, but it results in the slow progress of the implementation of the blockchain.
Many people believe that these ups and downs will only make the entire technology firmer and sounder and that we should see an increase in its implementations. But where?
Governments
When you think of blockchain, you might think of its implementation as something that you might see in a 25th-century movie. You might not be far from the truth, but blockchain
implementation in the government sector is closer than you think. For example, Dubai’s government is already working on 20 applications of blockchain to improve its functionality. They claim that they will probably the first blockchain-driven government, and that will likely be by 2020.
Payments
We already know that the blockchain technology is involved in payments, but at this point, the payments are only with cryptocurrencies. Among the many predictions of blockchain
applications are financial transactions. And the conversation is not about how to buy altcoins or
bitcoins, or to sell the. The focus if on proceeding typical payments.
As of this point, the standard transitions “routes” are time consuming and expensive. The ones within a country are not, but sending funds to another country can take some time, and there are fees associated with it, almost making them too expensive. The reason for that is that if you want to send funds from the US to some country in the EU, they would need to be converted. That process involves multiple banks to “work” with the funds before the person that you send them to can get them. All that work that the banks do will be charged off the funds that you want to transfer.
The way that blockchain might help improve financial transfers is by making them the opposite of what transfers are today – slow and expensive. By applying the technology, the transfers will be made almost instantly, and instead of them costing a fifth of the transferred funds, it will cost only a small fraction. The obstacles that we’re facing at the moments is certain regulations and acceptance of this technology by conventional banks. Once that hurdle is passed, a lot of things will change.
In general, this area of application for the blockchain technology is one of the most anticipated ones. The reason for that is the number of transactions carried out per year. Take MasterCard for example; they process around 74 billion transactions per year.
Identity
Identity theft and abuse have been a problem that our society has been facing for many years. That problem only increased as technology progressed. The blockchain technology’s implementation in this field can do more good than harm.
The blockchain technology relies on a verification process by each node in the network. That verification will help with the verification, for example, of transactions carried out by individuals that store someone else’s identity.
Conclusion
There are tons of applications for the blockchain technology in our day to day activities. Those applications can range from simple applications that make our lives easier to keeping our
government or transactions safe. In general, any implementation of that technology will do a lot more good than it will do any damage.