Using an easy analogy, let’s dig into the possibilities that blockchain can bring when applied to real life issues
I love multipurpose things.
They serve more than one objective and usually save time and resources, so you can develop more than one task with the same object/function.
Take butter, for instance.
It’s delicious and you can use it in the kitchen for so many things. I do believe that butter is like a ‘must-have’ in almost every recipe - sweet or salty, hot or cold. You can melt it for eggs but also can use it with flour to make an awesome dough.
But before you think this is a culinary article, I must warn you that we are not going to talk about food this time, unfortunately.
I’m just using this example to show that blockchain technology seems to be the butter of the web nowadays. There's only one problem: it appears that people haven't learned how to use butter in recipes yet since we are in an age when people don't understand the power of butter.
They are eating food that is dry and not flavoured - but, hey, it’s still food, so they are loving it! They still haven’t tasted butter, so how can they miss it?
Well, so let’s dig into the butter of the web.
I ask the same exact question: most people are only used to old systems and servers that are not as tamper-proof and updated as the blockchain, so how can they miss something they never even tried?
That’s why I profess now: when the butter (blockchain) gets into everyone’s recipe (systems), it’ll be impossible to imagine a world without it.
That’s why I separated three examples of the versatility of the blockchain and how it will affect our future, changing the way we see and execute things on the Web.
Recipe n#1: logistics in supply chain
Since we are talking about food, let’s imagine that you have a brand of cookies that you distributed to many supermarkets in the city.
They sell good and the return on investment is promising.
But later on, you receive a call from one of the supermarkets telling you that a customer went there to complain about cookies of your company that came with mould.
You don’t know what really happened because you are very thorough with your products and that would never happen under your watch.
At the same time, you get really concerned that it can happen with other customers, so you immediately respond to the supermarket and ask them to publish something in their social media or even locally in their stores letting people know that this product is not good.
However, it took time and the customer didn’t know what product batch was.
Also, you continue to not know what happened that caused this and now you can’t avoid a similar situation in the future.
And then… comes the butter!
A blockchain system implemented in logistics can help tracking products to know exactly where they have been through.
The products will “act” like the cryptocurrency and will be shared in the chain of blocks that have their own consensus algorithm and that will not allow the information to be tampered with - to alter one, you have to alter most of them.
With this system attached to the products batch, company owners can have more traceability on them, improving operational efficiency by mapping and visualizing enterprise supply chains.
Recipe #2: Medical profile
Now, the person who ate the cookie is sick and must go to the doctor.
But the doctor is not the one that the person is used to going to because he is out of the town. Or even the doctor is the same, but he has so many patients that he doesn’t even remember that person’s medical history.
So, he/she has to remind him of everything they have been through other than just the cookie accident so the doctor can recommend a proper treatment.
No biggie.
However, there is a possibility that allows that person to have the whole medical history in their phone through a smart contract hosted in the blockchain, completely locked and preserved in that decentralized system.
No one could have the access before, unless that person allowed it in the smart contract.
This provides a new possibility of a safe and cryptographed storage so anyone can use blockchain’s anonymity in their favor.
Recipe #3: Safe and trustworthy systems
One of the possibilities that I find most fascinating about blockchain is how it can help with polls and elections.
If all the information in the blockchain can be cryptographed, traceable and very hard to be tampered with, why not use it in a system that needs safety, anonymity and traceability more than everything else?
All the votes could be done even from people’s smartphones and it would be very difficult to alter information either way.
The vote would become the asset and would be verified in the blockchain with its own consensus algorithm, providing the reliability it needs to be counted in the end of the elections or the poll.
That would end once and for all the whole ‘vote on paper’ or ‘electronic vote’ debate.
So, why is it taking so long for people to finally discover “butter”? Is it because it’s too hard to understand? Or is it because people are afraid to ruin their “meals” with it?
Well, we don’t know until we try it.
Like the precursor that used butter on bread for the first time, we need to spread the recipe for the best solution to current issues on the internet.
And fixing those issues can be the first step to a more efficient and safe world.
It can be freeing, tasty and revolutionary. Just like butter.
Maluh Bastos
Klever Writer