Demystifying the blockchain

There’s quite a lot of hype around the blockchain, and more than a little confusion about what it does and how it might affect businesses. In this presentation, Hadley Stern, COO at Bloq, explains how the blockchain works and gives examples of how people have taken pillars of the blockchain technology and applied it to their own projects and use cases.

Highlights from Stern’s presentation include:

Think about how the World Wide Web democratized the spread of content and disrupted industries. Now, apply that same thinking to the industries that are going to be disrupted by the electronic transfer of value that blockchain provides. (9:02)

In the auto industry, a manufacturer builds a car and writes a VIN number and all the car’s specs to their database. Then, a dealer buys the car and duplicates all the car’s information in their database. This results in multiple databases with duplicate data—data that’s sometimes incorrect—running our economy. This is slow, cumbersome, and expensive. In a blockchain world, Stern explains, the participants work around a blockchain they all read and write data to. Suddenly, data is a shared resource that all participants along the value chain can use. (9:28)

Bitcoin is a little bit like Napster. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Napster exists today; what matters is that we all use music in a totally different way. This is what Marc Andreessen was getting at when he said, “Software is eating the world.” Once an innovation is out there, it will consume the world. And once the innovation of value transfer through software is out there, it’s just a matter of time—whether it’s banking, health care, government, food safety, etc.—before anything that can be digitized will be digitized. (11:10)

You can see Stern’s complete presentation in the video above.