Blockchain

Smart contract != block chain != crypto currency

Bitcoin may be a hype; the underlying technology, known as Blockchain, could disrupt many industries. As long as you are dealing with transactional data, Blockchain can help.

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger system, which would provide secure and permanent records.

Blockchain's Promises

• no downtime, no error or lost records. On traditional server architectures, if a single app is compromised or goes offline, many users and other apps are affected.
• no censorship, transparent, safe, auditable, no fraud: multi-source identification
• no third-party interference. By tokenizing the process and eliminating any middlemen

Blockchain's Applications

Or the industries that may be disrupted by Blockchain

blockchain solves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem

Companies

https://ont.io/

Development

Zen Protocol

Use Cases

Whenever an Intermediary is Needed

Banking and Payment

Now money transfer needs to go through the banking systems. Problems: fees, time to clear the transaction.

Blockchain can provide a low fee and instant solution to money transfer.

Real Estate

Blockchain can store all the documents and transactions

• reduce the paperwork required
• reduce the cost of the transaction. Deedcoin reduces the agent commission rate from 6% to 1%.
• secure: release funding only when the conditions are met.
• send money cross-border
• Abra: bitcoin-based remittance

Politics/Votes

• blockchain can take care of voter registration, identity verification
• count only the legitimit votes, no changes or removals.

Health

• securely storing medical records
• accurately and safely transferred to and accessed by the doctors and people who are authorized.
• Blockchain will aid in the authorization and identification of people.

Legal

• Legal documents, like wills, can be securely store in Blockchain. Any changes to the documents will be authenticated and stored.
• inheritance: easily pass down digital assets

Startup Funding

• Pitch Ventures: startups pitch investors live in a secure manner.

Video

• reduce cost of video traffic by decentralizing video encoding, storage, and content distribution
• VideoCoin

Education

• SocratesCoin

Cyber Security

Supply Chain

• reduce time and cost on monitoring, avoiding human errors
• track origin to verify authenticity(e.g. fair trade)

Analysis and Forcasting

• Augur

Networking and IoT

• eliminate need for centralized servers to handle communiacations

Insurance

• manage trust, ensure identity
• aeternity

Ride Sharing

• peer to peer ride sharing

Cloud Storage

• avoid comprimise and missing data

Charity

• track donations
• bitgive

Government

• transparency in operation, reduce corruption

Employee Benefits

Energy

• Energy producers and users trade through public grids
• Buy/sell peer-to-peer
• Electric cars, solar, home energy storage can sell electricity during peak hours

Music

• Licensing

Retail

• OpenBazar

Crowdfunding

• trust is created through smart contracts and online reputation systems.

Digital currency reading list

https://medium.com/@dwr/digital-currency-reading-list-6219f1623bfd

coinbase master plan: https://blog.coinbase.com/the-coinbase-secret-master-plan-f4d644443301