Blockchain - The Next Disruptive Computing Paradigm Shift
If you haven’t already heard of Blockchain, you probably will…. eventually. Although some of us still grapple with the concept or only associate it to Bitcoin, there is no doubt that this technology is causing a stir.
It is not simple to explain this to the average person (I have tried). I will do my best to simplify it and keep this article short and sweet. Blockchain is a digital cryptographically-secured ledger that serves as a platform for crypto-currencies and decentralized applications. Many industry experts agree that it has the potential to disrupt entire industries, markets and economies.
In doing extensive research on the mechanics and business cases of Blockchain, I have come to understand how the technology goes beyond the use of cryptocurrencies (Blockchain 1.0) and smart contracts (Blockchain 2.0) and into the meticulous organization of distributed activity, governance, science and even healthcare. I have selected three aspects that I believe substantiate the notion that Blockchain is the next disruptive computing paradigm shift.
The Trust Problem
All human societies have a trust problem. Trust and communication is required for co-ordination and cooperation with others. However, the potential to mislead and abuse that trust is always present. To address this trust problem, a lot of societies invented intermediaries such as central banks, government, rituals and laws.
The distributed consensus method that Blockchain provides eradicates the need for intermediaries. This means that societies could ultimately become reliant on the technology as a trust mechanism, which has the capacity to reshape our idea of trust entirely.
Product to Platforms
It used to be that firms looked to launch hit products. Now we see applications of Blockchain 2.0, such as Ethereum, as fully-fledged platforms on which decentralized applications can run.
The emphasis is moving from developing new applications to developing platforms, or “protocols” that can be implemented as needed. At the time of writing this, there are roughly 1400 decentralized applications running on the Ethereum network. Ethereum is a success and a great example of a Blockchain Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Dispersed Collaborative computing
In addition to crypto-currencies and smart contracts, Blockchain makes it seamless to organize group activities. Crowdfunding, ICO’s[1] and collaborative computing are drawing immense attention as they provide transparent and secure ways of collective contribution. A notable project that exhibits this is the Folding@Home Project. The Stanford University project is aimed at using distributed computing cycles to simulate protein folding for computational drug designs and molecular dynamic problems.
Like the Folding@Home Project, organizing any form of activity through a distributed network has the potential to reinvent every category of human endeavors, be it in politics, economy, health-care or science.
Conclusion
These three aspects , covered briefly, support the notion that Blockchain is the next disruptive computing paradigm shift. Some may debate whether this shift could have occurred in 1991 when Haber and Stornetta co-authored the book “How to time-stamp a digital document”. Well…. the concept of Blockchain existed then so why not? Why is this taking off now?
It is only now that it can truly flourish: After the discovery of the internet, after cloud computing, after the evolution of mobile devices, after all the things that have lead to the connected world we live in today. It is now that Blockchain can succeed. And it is succeeding before our very eyes. It is causing a fundamental change in our approaches and underlying assumptions of information technology. We are in the midst of a computing paradigm shift.
[1] Initial Coin Offering, a blockchain fundraising mechanism.
