Blockchain - the Future?

Blockchain is a technology which has the ability to transform and disrupt.  We have a long history of transforming our industries and society through the adoption of new technologies.

That is a challenge for many established businesses.  As blockchain creeps out from behind the long shadow created by its extensive use with altcoin currencies, its real benefits will start to be seen.

If businesses do not re-engineer their processes, using blockchain, then they may find that their competitors have already done so, and can deliver the same goods or services, but on better margins and higher profits.

It is not an easy process, and no one should underestimate inertia and the vested interest in leaving things unchanged.  But the prize is worth the effort.

The brave will look at all their costs in their business, and the prices they pay for their many processes.  The ordering department, the invoice department, the procurement department, the checking department  Just how much of their business is fashioned around the need to check, to deal, to correspond, and to pay?

How much can be re-engineered in small or large ways, to cut costs, speed up trade and payment, and gain a huge advantage over their competitors?
Blockchain offers the prospect of a trusted public ledger, which cannot be gamed and cannot be altered.  It is therefore trustworthy, and neither company nor supplier can change one word on it, once written.

Omar Khayyam would be proud.  The blockchain hand writes and, having written, moves on.

Blockchain is transparent, in that all or part of that ledger is open to interrogation, at any time and through any medium.

The stored data is open to those who need to use it.   So, we can look soon to a position where blockchain has established the provenance and position of assets; where it offers a contract to buy and sell them and then checks on their delivery and receipt and finally concludes with an automatic debiting and crediting of the altcoin accounts of the buyer and seller, all without friction, bank intervention or exchange rate costs.

These blockchain contracts are the future, but blockchain already works well in the present, in much of that sequence. So, trust and transparency.  How many industries currently fail to convince their customers that they have a complete grip on their supply chain? That their goods are incapable of counterfeiting, as they can identify and verify all their production of those goods, and show the result in a checkable, immutable, public ledger?

Establishing and proving good provenance is a prize much to be desired.  Businesses in many industries, and in many countries, face counterfeiting and shortchanging in their dealings.  They are used to that prospect and factor it into their thinking.

Their customers also factor that into their buying decisions, and sometimes make the flight to quality as a result, choosing the more expensive product, in the hope that their larger supplier will have a better handle on their production and distribution, and the desire to stamp out counterfeiting.

So, blockchain offers trust and transparency and so creates the third leg of the stool - truth.

How much of business friction is created and costs incurred in having to check the truth of what is being offered up?   How much of international trade depends upon creating trust, through a myriad of middlemen and banks with their letters of credit?

So, you have the trinity of T’s.  

Blockchain is a distributed ledger, held in multiple places, and worked upon by impartial third parties whose work is checked by others.  It creates Trust, Transparency and Truth and that has to be a good thing for consumers, for businesses and for economies.   

The challenge is to integrate it into business, as the next disruptive technology.

Perhaps that challenge is akin to the way in which the current online retail revolution was first viewed, when ushered in fully by the dot com boom.  An innovation which wasn’t really trusted at first by consumers and which at the time left many high street businesses cold, who dismissed what they viewed as wild claims for what it might achieve.  

How times have changed! 

The businesses which never adopted have since died or withered.  They stuck to what they knew best and didn’t innovate, when they still had the opportunity to do so.

Blockchain will become ubiquitous and universal but, meantime, many doubters still question this new internal combustion engine for change.

We are at another turning point now and the race will go to the swift.