2017: Blockbuster Year for Blockchain

Indeed, Year 2017 has been a blockbuster year for the Blockchain, and practically anything and everything that is related to Blockchain technology.

The fundamentals of Blockchain (together with computing decentralisation) has been brewing for a couple of years since 2011, but it was the crossing of the USD2,000 price threshold of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in late February of 2017, that really tipped the scales.

Suddenly, Wall Street and the rest of the fiat currency world sat up and paid attention. Incidentally, developments in the fintech are also at an all time high to fuel interest in the basis of technology driving the financial sector.

Anyone who has not been under a rock, still kick themselves for being under the rock when they did not capitalise on Bitcoin when it was first introduced as a blockchain-based digital currency. (Then, about seven years ago one Bitcoin was worth a measly USD0.002, and today it is trading at about USD4,400; not before touching USD5,000 sometime in August.)

Meanwhile, in tandem with this cryptocurrency and alt coins euphoria and frenzy from market regulatory, investors, funds raising ventures and retail developments…realisation dawns that right at the core of all this possibilities, is the Blockchain technology.

Simply explained, Blockchain is an example of distributed computing. One that is designed to securely obtain and deliver decentralized consensus, and therefore able to cut off any single, controlling 3^rd party.

Because of the Blockchain’s inherent characteristics, fuelled on by the global pandemic of economic value gains from cryptocurrencies…it has dawned on both the public and private corporate sector that a lot of operations and business transactional problems can be resolved by leveraging Blockchain concepts.

And does the modern world today move fast.

As it is now, there are hundreds of good, viable (and even working test cases) of decentralised applications (dApps) that are being developed on Blockchain technology for a whole diversity of real world usages.

Blockchain technology enables digital identity management, smart contracts (for voting, insuring, gaming, betting, etc) crowdfunding for humanitarian campaigns, food resource traceability, etc… the list is non-exhaustive and only limited by human imagination.

At the same time, the blockchain global community realises that it requires structured systems to work together for faster consensus and decisions. Blockchain associations mushroom up quickly, two notable global wide efforts are the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the Hyperledger Group; with dozens of notable country- and market-specific Blockchain groups forming together for betterment of the field.

In the enterprise IT space, Microsoft and IBM were one of the earliest to offer customers some form of distributed ledger resource; with Oracle also just announcing its blockchain-as-a service ecosystem.

There are just over two months to the end of 2017, but judging from it all, BlockChain is really making its mark starting this year, thanks to the giant headway lead by cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

IT BYTES BACK! Says: Reality is that despite the same continual uncertainties in the cryptocurrency work, social economics has already dictated the fate of Blockchain – it will form the fabric of how our new world functions, in all aspects.