By Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow
The emergent technology blockchain has been roiling the technology and financial services industries for months, and, now, people in other industries and government agencies are asking questions about it. I’m convinced that it has the potential to transform not only the way commerce is done but the interplay between governments, businesses and citizens.
That’s why I was pleased to be asked to testify yesterday before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing & Trade.
Members of the subcommittee are looking into what they call “disruptive” technologies to assess their potential impact on businesses, government and the economy, and they asked me to give my views on blockchain. They’re right to call blockchain disruptive. It’s a revolutionary technology. Blockchain-based systems could help radically improve whole industries, beginning with banking and insurance. But its impact could be much broader. It could make a difference whenever valuable assets are transferred from one party to another and whenever you need to know for certain that a piece of digital information is unique and unchangeable by any party without the agreement of all parties.
There are four key points that anybody learning about blockchain for the first time, including government officials, should understand. They are:
1) Blockchain creates trustworthy and efficient interactions. While blockchain is the core technology that enables the Bitcoin crypto currency to operate, it can be used for entirely different purposes.
It’s a distributed ledger shared via a peer-to-peer network that maintains an ever-expanding list of data records. Each participant has an exact copy of the ledger’s data, and additions to the chain are propagated throughout the network. Therefore, all participants in an interaction have an up-to-date ledger that reflects the most recent transactions or changes. In this way, Blockchain reduces the need for establishing […]
