Introduction
Blockchain, which began to emerge as a real-world tech option in 2016 and 2017, is poised to change IT in much the same way open-source software did a quarter century ago. And in the same way Linux took more than a decade to become a cornerstone in modern application development, Blockchain will likely take years to become a lower cost, more efficient way to share information and data between open and private business networks. Based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) topology, blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that allows data to be stored globally on thousands of servers – while letting anyone on the network see everyone else's entries in near real-time. That makes it difficult for one user to gain control of, or game, the network. [ Further reading: What is FinTech (and how has it evolved)? ] However, in highly publicized incidents over the five years, blockchains have been hacked, typically through a cryptocurrency application such as bitcoin. Smaller blockchains with fewer nodes (or computers) have also been susceptible to fraud, with would-be thieves gaining control of the majority of nodes. For businesses, however, blockchain holds the promise of transactional transparency – the ability to create secure, real-time communication networks with partners around the globe to support everything from supply chains to payment networks to real estate deals and healthcare data sharing. Recent hype around this relatively new technology is real because DLT, in essense, represents a new paradigm for how information is shared; tech vendors and enterprises, not surprisingly have rushed to learn how they can use the distributed ledger technology (DLT) to save time and admin costs. Numerous companies have already rolled out, or are planning to launch, pilot programs and real-world projects across a variety of industries - everything from financial technology (FinTech) and healthcare to mobile payments and global shipping. So while blockchain isn't going to replace traditional corporate relational databases, it does open new doors for the movement and storage of transactional data inside and outside of global enterprises. Driven mainly by financial technology (fintech) investments, blockchain has seen a fast uptick in adoption for application development and pilot tests in a number of industries and will generate more than $10.6 billion in revenue by 2023, according to a report from ABI Research. Most of that revenue figure is expected to come from software sales and services.
What is blockchain?
First and foremost, blockchain is a public electronic ledger built around a P2P system that can be openly shared among disparate users to create an unchangeable record of transactions, each time-stamped and linked to the previous one. Every time a set of transactions is added, that data becomes another block in the chain (hence, the name). Blockchain can only be updated by consensus between participants in the system, and once new data is entered it can never be erased. It is a write-once, append-many technology, making it a verifiable and auditable record of each and every transaction.
Public vs Private Blockchain
As a peer-to-peer network, combined with a distributed time-stamping server, public blockchain ledgers can be managed autonomously to exchange information between parties. There's no need for an administrator. In effect, the blockchain users are the administrator. A second form of blockchain, known as private or permissioned blockchain, allows companies to create and centrally administer their own transactional networks that can be used inter- or intra-company with partners. Additionally, blockchain networks can be used for "smart contracts," or scripts for business automation that execute when certain contractual conditions are met. For example, after a bad batch of lettuce resulted in customers becoming sick from e-coli, Walmart and IBM created a blockchain-based supply chain to track produce from farm to table. Walmart has asked its produce suppliers to input their data to the blockchain database by September 2019. Once on the blockchain, produce can be automatically tracked through smart contracts from point to point, removing human intervention and error.
How secure is Blockchain?
While no system is "unhackable," blockchain's simple topology is the most secure today, according to Alex Tapscott, the CEO and founder of Northwest Passage Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in blockchain technology companies. "In order to move anything of value over any kind of blockchain, the network [of nodes] must first agree that that transaction is valid, which means no single entity can go in and say one way or the other whether or not a transaction happened," Tapscott said. "To hack it, you wouldn't just have to hack one system like in a bank..., you'd have to hack every single computer on that network, which is fighting against you doing that. "So again, [it's] not un-hackable, but significantly better than anything we've come up with today," he said. The computing resources needed for most blockchains are tremendous, Tapscott said, because of the number of computers involved. For example, the bitcoin blockchain harnesses anywhere between 10 and 100 times as much computing power as all of Google's serving farms put together.
