While CES has had its “firsts,” an item overlooked by ALL the mainstream tech sites will be a game-changer or more precisely a quantum life-shift in the near future. This is singularly the most important thing shown in the history of CES or (depending on your age) your lifetime. You may possibly have heard the term “Blockchain” (originally called “Block Chain”) but like the first time you heard about email or even the internet, you didn’t understand its full implications. Well, this is one that will affect your life in the very near future (one to five years) and you more than likely don’t have a clue what it is. It’s truly an almost invisible revolution. This is your wake-up call from the future.
To start, it’s already begun … and its eventual full-scale use to affect our lives has irreversibly begun. In the modern history of man (say, the last 500+ years or so) there have been exactly four events that have fundamentally changed society everywhere. Those are: 1) the printing press in the 1500’s freed knowledge; 2) the engine eliminated the need for back-breaking manual labor and slavery; 3) the automobile allowed quick distant travel for the masses; and 4) and the computer/internet made the world a much smaller place. Each of these addressed a problem that couldn’t be resolved previously.
Blockchain is the answer for the next problem … trust and security. Should you own property, have money or have medical records (as we all do), the last thing you want is for them being easy to change or falsify. Blockchain puts a very permanent end to that.
Among the businesses expected to be literally wiped-out or damaged by Blockchain are banks, credit reporting companies and title companies (it is a really long list, so this is just an example of a few of the most significant) as it effectively does away with 95% their need. (Bank of America has 50+ Blockchain patents currently and JP Morgan-Chase Bank is currently moving to Blockchain.)
What is needed is an immutable solution to storing information securely and that’s what it provides. Not even a quantum computer can permanently hack it. Once a baseline is established, from that point going forward, fraud is essentially impossible. (unless you’re willing to spend $256,000.00 an hour for the leased computing power to TRY to crack it.)
For example, a title search can take days to weeks and cost thousands of dollars. With Blockchain it’s measured in microseconds and pennies. A currency transfer can take a week (did the Nigerian lottery commission get my prize redemption fee?) Less than a second can tell you if you actually have the money in your account … foreign currency transfers are especially vulnerable to fraud and fluctuation.
Well what is it??? This system uses distributed computing to spread the data across the web with each and every file having a special “key” that is linked to every other file linked to the special “key” created before and after it was created. Should one key or more be hacked, upon its attempt to be opened, it knows it’s wrong and goes searching worldwide for the innumerable matching keys and erases/replaces the false one.
This is a very, very simplistic explanation, but effectively makes the data absolutely trustworthy. No more middlemen to verify the info is accurate. This will be how you pay your taxes in a just a few years … direct transfer to the government, bypassing the banking system. Eventually, ALL transactions other than cash in-hand will be done via the Blockchain system. No more bounced checks, credit fraud or middleman costs. Credit card fraud will be substantially eliminated, and, it will expand to even mundane things such as school grades, automobile records, photos and software to things of extreme value like the stock exchange. Companies like Western Union for money transfers will simply be unnecessary and redundant.
As every seminal man-made event that has changed our lives has gotten more complicated, Blockchain is the most complex, but in some ways, one of the most simple. You will be depending on it in the future to determine the accuracy of almost everything of any value to you — from buying a home to how many “stars” you have at Starbucks …
At the 2019 CES lines were being drawn for who will dominate the Blockchain universe. Several companies were lining up to be the next big thing and despite being only being around a few hundred square feet of display space out of the almost three million available, it was the truest harbinger of “things to come.” ALL major companies will use it in less than a handful of years and it will be the standard of trust in our lives. The next tech billionaires will probably be Blockchain company starters … the money rush in investments has already started. The “gold rush” for Blockchain in the tech investment field is a virtual stampede. Almost half of the world has no access to a bank, but through Blockchain, will have access to the rest of the world’s economy.
Give that a thought for a moment … the world’s getting smaller every day.