The BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY: The World is Now Falling in Line

For several years, the Blockchain Technology has been met with so much skepticism about it's application and uses but today, many suggestions are now been made about the proposed use of the Blockchain Technology which powers bitcoins. Some of the possible real world applications of the technology are examined below:

Image credit: techworld

VOTING

In Australia, the government owned company, Australia Post, which handles mail, logistics and services throughout Australia, just announced it will be carrying out a test of its new digital voting system, which uses the Blockchain Technology as the ground infrastructure upon which the process will be built. It introduces many Australians possibly for the first time, to the concept of distributed ledger technology. The system aims to provide a tamper-proof, trustworthy infrastructure that can eliminate any chance of manipulation, while maintaining accountability and transparency of the process for voters and administrators.

Image credit : Tech Republic

It is coming behind the backdrop of an increase in demand for digitization and it is believed that the time to use the available blockchain technology to solve the digital voting challenge experienced in the election process is now. The grand idea behind the project is to make the election process a more efficient service to operate overall, while reducing the operating cost and the counting errors, and at the same time, increasing convenience for voters.

---

Music (Royalties Collection and Payments)

Revelator, an Israel based start-up, is harnessing the power of the Blockchain Technology to the advantage of the music industry. The real time nature of the technology’s record-keeping allows the company to track the use of digital assets and get royalties of any size to those owed (including everyone involved in the music production) as fast as possible. At the moment, Revelator believes almost half of the royalty payments due to artists and all those involved in the creation of music aren't getting to the correct owners because of the outdated systems.

Image credit: Digital Assetx

Artists and all the others who own rights to a particular music wait for months to receive their royalties. It's even more complicated when there are multiple partners who split the rights on the same song. But with the application of the blockchain technology to music royalty collection and splitting, there is real time collection of data like track downloads on the public ledger and payments can be made more quickly with reference to the data obtained more quickly.

In an interview with Mashable, Bruno Guez, CEO and founder of Revelator said

"The blockchain technology does provide a truly disruptive technology for the music industry. It's not the only thing that matters and it won't solve all the problems in the industry, but I do believe our current offering introduces new features for music."

The decentralized control nature of the Blockchain Technology is making it very attractive for such innovation to begin to resonate and this is expected to introduce new features for music as we know it.

---

Stopping “Blood Diamonds”

Another amazing application of this technology is the announcement that the Blockchain Technology could soon be used to stop illegal fighters in war torn areas of the world from funding their efforts with the mining and sale of diamonds.

Image credit: Pixabay

Finance Magnate report that, the current chairman of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, the organisation saddled with the responsibility of stopping the circulation of so-called ‘blood diamonds’, Ahmed bin Sulayem from the United Arab Emirates announced the new Blockchain initiative. In his statement, he said

“We have introduced the possibility of using Blockchain Technology to create a seamless and continued global process for the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme.”

According to the reports, he has already held meetings with the Blockchain Council of Dubai and a test project that would use the technology to monitor Kimberley Process Certification Scheme statistics is being worked upon.

---

Visa Inter-bank Payments

Visa will be taking the first steps towards disrupting the market for payments between banks by inviting lenders to test a system for sending money using the Blockchain Technology, as reported by Financial Times . The Blockchain allows transactions to be recorder and verified electronically without a central ledger, over a network of computers and the cryptography of the process is used to protect data from fraudsters or hackers. The credit card company has partnered with BTL Group, a digital payments start-up company to adapt its technology for processing interbank payments.
According to the co-founder of Visa Europe Collab, Hendrik Kleinsmiede, this project is designed to speed up settlement time, cut cost and reduce credit risk in the market for moving money between banks both domestically and across borders.

Image credit: newsbtc

The FT reports that “The project being developed with Visa uses smart contracts, which is code written on to the Blockchain that automatically carries out certain actions, to handle much of the regulatory and compliance requirements of interbank transfers.” One of the founders of BTL Group, Guy Halford-Thomson, in his interview with Financial Times said the smart contracts could reduce the counterparty risk of cross-border transfers by making them simultaneous, rather than leaving one lender on the hook for a time.

In the past 18 months, many of the world’s biggest financial services companies, now including Visa, have switched from viewing bitcoin with suspicion to now scrambling to harness the underlying power of the crypto-currency’s technology.

---

This is just the beginning; the surface has not even been scratched yet. From proposal to have cheques built to use Blockchains to the use of the Blockchain Technology to create smart guns, powered by the distributed ledger technology, it is simply on its way to taking over the world. And while at that, since Steemit is a platform built on this same technology, there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how high this platform can fly!

Kindly make your comments below. Upvotes will be appreciated.

If you want to, you can please follow me @delphia16

Happy Steeming!