The Many Ways in Which Blockchain is Changing Our World

When people hear the world blockchain thrown around the most common thing that comes to mind is Bitcoin. But is Bitcoin blockchain? Well Bitcoin is certainly the first mainstream cryptocurrency to utilize a blockchain for wealth preservation and wealth transference but its not what people are referring to when they mention blockchain.

Blockchain technology is so powerful it has the potential to transform all sorts of different centralized applications and services into transparent decentralized applications and services. Blockchain technology will be applied to fields including finance, healthcare, media, government and all sorts of other sectors, in fact you may not know this but it is being incorporated into these fields every day in all sorts of ways we can hardly imagine.

In this article I will discuss many of the ways blockchain has already been integrated into our world. The development of new and innovative technologies is moving at lightspeed and blockchain technology is being incorporated into modern day business applications at an accelerating rate.

Image Source: Eweek

One area in which blockchain is being utilized is in cybersecurity as companies look to capitalize on the technology to create keyless signature systems with the capability of securing health records.

A company called Guardtime is looking to accomplish this task currently to secure the health records of one million Estonian citizens. Securing extremely sensitive information in a decentralized manner has many benefits and allow health care providers to reduce costs by saving them time and expense.

Another company called REMME is basically a decentralized authentication system which is making a sincere effort to replace logins and passwords with SSL certificates stored on a blockchain.

These are just a few of the many ways blockchain is being applied to cybersecurity with many exciting new ventures sure to be coming in 2018 and beyond!

Image Source: MIT Media Lab

Another field in which blockchain technology has a potential to transform is the global health care industry. For example, one company called Gem is working with the Centre for Disease Control to encrypt disease outbreak data onto a blockchain which will potentially result in more efficient disaster relief and response activities.

Another company called SimplyVital Health is currently developing two health-related blockchain products. The first product is called ConnectingCare, a blockchain that tracks the progress of patients after they leave the hospital. Their other blockchain product is called Health Nexus, which is focused around providing decentralized blockchain patient records.

Finally, one of the most promising blockchain projects I've seen focused around the health care industry is called MedRec.

MedRec is a project that is being developed and managed by MIT to create a blockchain that can securely store electronic medical records while also managing authentication, confidentiality and data sharing.

Image Source: IBTimes UK

Another industry which is being transformed by blockchain technology may come to you as no surprise. I'm talking about the financial services industry.