How Blockchain is Already Taking Over YouTube Competitors, Finance and More

It is becoming clear that Blockchain technology has massive implications for almost all aspects of our lives. Nothing has shown such wide sweeping promise since the internet or the latest generation of AI. Today we’ll be covering some of the actual projects that are going on currently that take advantage of blockchain technology.

This technology has been called many things, the next stage of the Internet, a trustless system of value and the most important technology ever invented. Let’s put some perspective on this. But first things first. If you don’t know what blockchain actually is? all you need to know is the following.

The blockchain is a decentralized transparent and verifiable system where value such as ownership titles, medical records and cryptocurrency can be exchanged. This value is stored in something called a digital block. The blocks are linked together in such a way that the unique digital identity of the next block is linked to the identity of the previous block, hence blockchain.

The blockchain is shared on a peer-to-peer network where a continuously updated ledger keeps track of who owns what. These Ledger’s are secured by mathematics. The entire system is distributed among a network of computers rather than resting with a single provider. This means that data can’t be tampered with without anyone knowing and finally there are many different blockchains used for different applications. So, blockchain is a distributed system that’s used to exchange value and can’t be tampered with.

An important concept to know is the idea of smart contracts. Blockchain enables a new class of apps called Smart contracts. Smart contracts basically replace what people would do within any agreement. For example say you have two parties, Party A and Party B that agree on some terms. In a smart contract, these terms are written into the code. When the conditions have been satisfied, the contract is automatically executed. No lawyers, no company that releases held funds, no disputes and no middlemen needed. It’s all automatic done exactly as both parties had defined in the agreement. You can take this idea further and link smart contracts together to create an entire company that does things automatically. This is called a decentralized autonomous organization or Dao. The results eliminate waste, reduces the risk of fraud and opens up a whole new world of automatic systems.

All right so now that we’re refreshed with the underlying technology. let’s take a look at the impact that this is already having on the world. let’s start somewhere very close to me, the creative video community. currently, we have YouTube and twitch but I’ll be focusing on YouTube here.

YouTube like most other companies is interested in profit and that’s fine there’s nothing wrong there. But the way YouTube is being managed leads to some incentives. That result in a negative outcome for content creators and users. the Two major ones are as follows.

Number one Demonetization. YouTube has to run a fine balance between satisfying the creators, the people who populate the site’s content and the advertisers those who pay YouTube for having people watch the creators content. lately, YouTube has been cracking down on content that it finds might damage an advertiser’s brand image. This has led to frustration from content creators as their revenue streams can vanish overnight seemingly without explanation.

Number two advertising. A lot of people find advertising distracting and a bit intrusive as advertisers can track your online behavior.

A few blockchain startups are looking to create a better system. First up we have, Viewly, they’re providing direct support for creators through a vote based tipping system through the blockchain. This cuts out the middleman. Another bonus is that Viewly is ad free because the payments are made instantly automatically through smart contracts. The payments are carried out in cryptocurrency tokens which can be converted into any form of currency that one wishes. Viewly states that their long-term goal is to evolve into a fully fledged decentralized autonomous organization. Viuly not to get confused with Viewly and Flixxo so are both similar and run on the etherion blockchain. But in these cases, viewers also get paid to watch. Lino a is another such project which just successfully raised twenty million dollars in funding.

Lino states that they hope to free creators from the suffocating group of YouTube revenue sharing agreements, terms, and conditions and pay people for watching content. Basically, if your content is in high demand you get rewarded. No more gatekeepers flaming viewpoints they don’t agree with.

Project lead, Wilson Wei states quote, we are trying to create a decentralized autonomous video-content community so we can cut out the middleman and don’t have the conflict of interest between the users and the content creators. Dtube is yet another blockchain video site. But it’s been up and running for over a year. So this is all good and interesting to see but my worry with this is user fragmentation. Initially I think there’s going to be a tussle for which platform to use but eventually, user adoption will force an equilibrium and the best system will come out on top. also seeing that the etherion blockchain couldn’t even run crypto kiddies without slowing down. I’ll say we’re still a ways away from an etherium blockchain YouTube competitor. but regardless I think that these ideas are a better way of doing things and will likely be the future of user-based online video creation and besides another blockchain such as Cardano I know, it could provide more stability.

Okay so let’s zoom out a little bit and take a wider look at the impact blockchain is having. So we’ll get to the dizzying array of current blockchain projects. But first, let’s take a look at Everipedia. this is basically a blockchain version of Wikipedia and it’s more interesting than it sounds.

The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger who was part of the new project says you can think of it as a distributed database. Sort of written for the blockchain. Essentially, so it goes hand in hand with the blockchain or at least with the kind of blockchain that we have which is based on EOS. It will be one of the two main content blockchains platforms. I could go on about that for a long time and there are many different aspects because there’s a lot of different advantages to the blockchain. But what the blockchain does is, it opens up the possibility of having a truly credible peer-to-peer network of Encyclopedias. Again it’s open source and the content is open content. But what if we collect all of those articles or at least links to all of those articles in one place and then we make them all ratable. So somebody could go to a page about Australia right and there are a dozen articles about Australia there, you read them through and you give your rating of each article a bunch of other people does. The best rises to the top and the best article according to everybody in the system is bound to be pretty darn good but what if, the people who are doing the rating also share information about themselves. Your nationality, your politics, your religion, your academic specializations, your philosophy whatever and then you could look at the articles about Australia and slice them and dice them in different ways. What do the Australians think are is the best article about Australia? What about the Americans or let’s talk about something more interesting. What about the topic of jihad?

Imagine a hundred different articles about jihad. Why would there be a hundred because as soon as this sort of thing is created there is a competition? so see people start competing to write the best article. So you can imagine the best articles according to Saudi Arabians or according to Libyans or what about according to all Muslims or how about Muslims who identify as moderate Muslims or how about Muslims who identify as traditional Muslims or what about American conservatives or American Democrats right.

You would be able to compare different points of view on a topic like a jihad and that could potentially create a huge amount of understanding that just doesn’t exist it. It heightens the level of the conversation. That’s the point and Wikipedia doesn’t do it. Wikipedia doesn’t allow it. They have only one article about the topic because there’s only one community. Yes, of course, it’s possible and people enjoy getting themselves into bubbles and internet silos but I think you’re not going to be able to avoid other points of view in today’s world. So if you have a competition to represent the best that is known on a given subject, now you have tools to engage in that debate much much better than you can endure a regime of fake news and sensationalistic media of all sorts.

So restoring global empathy by making people see things from the other point of view is absolutely awesome and very commendable. So let’s take a look at the wider aspects here.

1. Government
   Dubai. Dubai has set its sights on becoming the world’s first blockchain powered state. In 2016, representatives of 30 government departments formed a committee dedicated to investigating the opportunities across health records, shipping business registration and more. It’s estimated that the blockchain will amount to 1.5 billion dollars and savings per year. Much of this enhanced productivity will stem from moving to a paperless government with a blockchain document processing removing around 100 million paper transactions a year.

Estonia, the Estonian government has partnered with Ericsson on a blockchain initiative to create a new data center where all public records are stored on the blockchain.

South Korea, Samsung, of course, is creating blockchain solutions for the South Korean government which will be put to use in public safety and transport applications.

The UK government is also working on blockchain technology for pension payments.

1. Cybersecurity
   A guard time is a company trading keyless signature systems using the blockchain. It is currently being already used to secure the health records of 1 million Estonian citizens. Guard Time is also working with DARPA, Lockheed Martin, and Ericsson.

2. Healthcare
   The company Gem is a start-up working with the Center for Disease Control. They’re going to put disease outbreak data onto the blockchain which is hoped to increase the effectiveness of disaster relief and response.

A company called simply vital health is a couple of blockchain related projects going on. One of them tracks the progress of patients after they leave the hospital and another one provides decentralized blockchain patient records.

MIT is spearheading a project called Meldrick. It’s a blockchain project designed to manage authentication, confidentiality and data sharing of medical records and is already up and running in Israel.

1. Financial services
   Barclays Bank has launched a number of blockchain initiatives involving tracking financial transactions and combating fraud. Barclays State quote, our belief is that the blockchain is a fundamental part of the new operating system for the planet in the quote.

2. Manufacturing and industrial
   JioCoin India’s biggest conglomerate Reliance Industries has said that is developing a blockchain based supply chain logistics platform along with its own cryptocurrency, JioCoin.

The transactive grid is an interesting project based in Brooklyn that allows members to locally produce and sell energy. The goal is to reduce the cost involved with energy distribution.

The StorJIO is distributed and encrypted cloud storage which allows members to share and used hard drive space.

1. Retail
   open Bazaar is a company that’s attempting to build a decentralized market where goods and services can be traded with no middleman.

2. Real Estate
   ubiquity is a start-up that’s creating a blockchain driven system for tracking the completed legal process which usually creates friction and expense in the real estate transfer.

3. Transport
   Arcade City is an application which aims to beat uber at their own game basically bringing ride-sharing to the blockchain.

It’s becoming clear that a shift is taking place here. Some big players can see that this is a viable option in the future. For example, IBM alone is working on 400 different blockchain projects with 63 clients.

It seems that blockchains biggest winners will be those who want to cut out middlemen. For example, for information and content creation services, this seems to entail the Wild West days of the internet where there was more freedom to see what you want to see without it being controlled and moderated by a governing party.

But cutting out the middleman there’s a lot further in developing nations. For example, blockchain is starting to take on the task of bridging a poverty gap around the world. With blockchain, as long as you have access to a smartphone, you have a way to conveniently access money. Additionally, blockchain is a decentralized system which means that you don’t get charged to transfer money, the way you would with a typical financial institution. The former usually deters businesses from reaching certain regions of the world and serving opportunities for developing countries. For example and this next statistic shocked me last year the total amount of cost to send money to sub-Saharan Africa was over 30 billion dollars. This is according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So, 13 billion dollars in frictional losses just by having middlemen. A platform called bit Pisa directly aims to solve this problem through blockchain technology and I’m sure there’ll be many other projects on the way.