Topic: Blockchain Usage In Mainstream Examples (Read 333 times)

Elections are the second best field of application for blockchain

Or just the best one ever, depending on what is more important to you personally, power or money (remember, power is not for sale, i.e. you can't buy it with money directly, even with bitcoins). Having said that, a few American States have been testing waters in that direction recently (both Virginias come to mind instantly). According to this CoinTelegraph article, the main purpose of this effort is to "secure voter records and election results"

With the exception of money, in which other ways or fields do you think blockchain can be used or is being used hopefully with a view to making the lives of average individuals better?

Biggest innovation of blockchain is money. It helps to be able to move it fast, cheap and securely and untraceable. It is premisionless and censorship resistant.    I mean what else do you want really?

A lot has really happened and Bitcoin has grown to be more popular than it used to be in the past.
A lot of people knows about Bitcoin now and there are lots of online merchants that are accepting Bitcoin as their payment method.

Lots of online shopping platforms like overstock, Bitplaza, Newegg, AWBstore and you can also buy games from Microsoft with Bitcoin. So, it’s really growing and as time continues it will go even far. Locally, I have also seen stores that are exchanging cryptocurrency for cash. And apart from increasing adoption bitcoin has also been the best performing asset in 2019.

This looks very interesting, and I'm going off thinking about its possible applications in my countries health care system. I used to keep my eye on a couple of projects, but these were all ICOs and the emphasis was more on profit, so a couple of them have fizzled out while the rest are yet to take off.

I was also looking into the possible applications of the blockchain technology into (real-time) advertising, can not recall the websites now, also not sure if the projects are still active. Would update this reply when I do some research.

Blockchain is a good data structure for maintaining the integrity of data.

This trait is what makes it a good foundation for currencies, ledgers or accounting systems. The data being cryptographically signed and authenticated, introduces an additional abstraction layer making it hard(er) to alter, delete or forge data.

Blockchain could be a decent platform for electronic voting systems, records keeping, archives, inventory, ledgers, accounting. Anything where a reliable integrity of electronic data must be maintained

If you’ve ever bought or sold a property you will know that it can take a long time. There are a number of reasons for this. Some delays are avoidable and some are inevitable. With so many people involved in the process, it is often difficult for the buyer and seller to know what is happening at each stage.

Our ambition at HM Land Registry is to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data. Our Digital Street research project enables us to explore how we can use technology to make processes such as buying and selling property simpler, faster and cheaper.

This year in Digital Street we set out to build a prototype that would enable a digital transfer of a property that automatically updates the Land Register. We were keen to test the use of blockchain technology in a digital transfer and therefore developed the prototype using the Corda platform.

To demonstrate the benefits of a fully distributed network, we worked with leading conveyancing firms Mishcon de Reya and MyHomeMove, payment intermediary Shieldpay, digital identity provider Yoti and HM Revenue & Customs to build an end-to-end proof of concept. We also created a simple mobile interface for the buyer and seller so they could complete their actions on their mobile phones, such as verifying their identity and signing their agreements. All we needed then was a real life property transaction to test the prototype.

On 6 March 2019 the sale of a recently refurbished, semi-detached house in Gillingham had completed. It had taken 22 weeks, much longer than the six weeks the buyer and seller had expected. In early April we sat down with all the parties involved to see how much time it would take to run the sale and purchase through our blockchain prototype.

We used a video chat to bring everyone together. The buyer, Peter, was at work in Medway and his conveyancer was in Manchester. The seller, Stefan, was in his partner’s home in Gravesend and his conveyancer was in central London. The Digital Street team were in Plymouth, with representatives from Yoti in London and Shieldpay calling in from Malaga, Spain. Once each action had completed (such as drafting the sales agreement) the application automatically informed the next party it was their turn to act. The demonstration of the technology ran through, end to end, in less than 10 minutes.

By using blockchain technology, each party was able to see a current view of the transaction, any historical actions that had been taken, and actions that still need to take place before the transaction was complete.

By holding definitive and permanent records of a property transaction in the open, with each stage of the transfer recorded for all parties to see, there is no confusion on who needs to act next.

By using smart contracts, we enable automation across the transaction including the transfer of funds and updating the Land Register (we used a copy of the Land Register for the test).

Overall this test was a success and we believe that blockchain technology could enable:

    speedier property transactions
    more trust in the transaction
    higher levels of security
    increased transparency for participants in the transaction

As we start 2020, looking back at 2019 and before that - what in your opinion were the biggest innovations where implementation of blockchain was a big step forward (medical, economical, scientific etc) and how did it impact those that were to be beneficiaries of that implementation?

Kindly list them and share your opinions

I've been keeping an eye out for blockchain developments in the medical sector for quite some time. There a quite a few on the horizon or in development, but few that have actually reached a workable solution yet. There's a good summary in this paper - Blockchain in Healthcare: A Patient-Centered Model. Scroll down to Table 1 for a TL;DR of the different systems currently being discussed or developed.

Many of them revolve around storing patient data, of which I still have my doubts for two reasons. First of all, privacy of this data is paramount, and given this data is now being decentralized and distributed across multiple servers and sites, there would need to be robust mechanisms in place to ensure its security. Second of all, the amount of data which a single patient can generate is massive. Even the data from a single hospital would rapidly become expensive to store on a blockchain model. However, there are a few projects I've found which seem to be trying to address these issues. A couple of relevant quotes below. There was another project I read about (I can't seem to find the paper at the moment) which discussed about storing health records off-chain, but using a blockchain system to organize and permit access to them, which also looked quite interesting.



I've also been quite interested in the development of a project called RAPID, or Real-Time Application for Portable Interactive Devices, by Booz Allen and the FDA, which is designed to be used during pandemics and other public health emergencies to improve data sharing between hospitals.