By HUSAIN HAIDER
Five dollars of bitcoins purchased in 2008 would be worth about $4.4 million today. The digital currency has proven to be one of the most outrageous investments in recent history.
In 2010, an early adopter of the digital dollars spent 22 bitcoins for two pizzas. “I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day,” posted “lazlo” on May 18, 2010. “I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.”
It took Lazlo four days to find someone to take him up on his deal, the hankering for a late-night snack eventually ended up costing $21.7 million.
Let the haters chew on that for a while.
Seven years later, there are Bitcoin ATMS, vending machines and Japanese Parliament is considering making Bitcoins legal tender in their country. Not bad for a something which was once a tool for criminals and geeks to conduct transactions online.
The Building Blocks of Bitcoins
Bitcoin enables online payments to be transferred instantly, directly and most importantly, without an intermediary. Still, the most revolutionary stuff is behind the scenes. Bitcoin’s exist on a fine line between being private but still a matter of public record–and that’s all because of “blockchains.”
Blockchains are to Bitcoins as what satellite is to television, they’re the backend to a powerful platform for change.
For instance, each bitcoin transaction is on a public ledger. The public ledger is broken into chunks (blocks) and then linked together chronologically (chains)—coming together to form an international ledger that is processed by volunteer computers around the world. The valuable information is never completely available to just one device so the result is a decentralized method of doing business.
Last year, the World Economic Forum predicted that roughly 10% of the world’s GDP will be stored on blockchains.
The move is a paradigm shift, as it stands today, most of the world’s financial information is private and a closely guarded secret. So imagine a list of every online transaction that has ever been conducted being anonymized, scattered and available to anyone with an idle computer running. Blockchain technology can also be applied to the energy sector, healthcare sector and even revolutionize the way we vote.
Let There Be Light
Blockchains could change the way we get our energy. Instead of dealing with large corporations to get energy for your home, people will be able to go right to the well and get P2P Electricity.
Leading the way are a couple of Dutch community-based power companies called Powerpeers and LO3 Energy.
“Just give me your solar energy and I will take care of your plants during your summer break,” Lars Falch told his friend Michiel Ooms a couple of years back – and the idea for Powerpeers was born. The vision for Powerpeers is to be able to buy environmentally-friendly energy from your friends and neighbours by trading money, labor or even things you may have lying around your house.
Similar projects are in their infancy around the world. Brooklyn Microgrid (another Dutch project), is kind of like Uber for electricity. It requires users to attach wifi-enabled boxes to their electricity meter, then simply order green energy over their smartphones on the same local grid.
“Now, if someone’s producing solar power and someone wants to consume local clean energy, we no longer have to ask someone in the middle to approve the transaction,” said Scott Kessler, director of business development for L03 Energy, the company behind the undertaking.
Blockchains Could Cure Illnesses
Sony sold the Playstation 3 at a loss, anticipating profits from the sales of accessories and software titles. Users may recall “Folding@home”—a program developed at Stanford University which utilized the Playstation’s idle processing resources to conduct research on Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer by computing the way protein folds.
Alphabet is also getting in on the action with Google DeepMind. Healthcare records are highly fragmented. Alphabet’s new project creates a new code for each piece of health care data collected. The result will be real-time data which will be impossible to fake. Google (partnered with the NHS in Britain) signed a data-sharing agreement which will collect, anonymize and analyze healthcare information.
The software would also be able to alert medical staff to early signs of diseases, diagnose eye disease and guide cancer treatment.
“There are potentially huge advantages for all of us in improving the way our health system uses data, both so that we can have our own data used to help us faster and more efficiently, and by using aggregate data to make predictions,” said Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind.
Voting and Blockchains
In 2001, Estonia became the first country to hold ‘electronic elections.’ Few processes are more centralized as a national voting process so perhaps the most independent way to count these votes is via blockchains. Considering the ‘hanging-chad’ scandal in 2000 and accusations of foreign hacking during this past American election, it may seem prosperous to have blockchain voting but the Australian government has already submitted plans to implement blockchain voting.
“In many ways voting is an ideal use case for blockchain technology application beyond crypto currency. With demand for digitization high and technology shifts opening up new approaches we believe that now is the time to solve the digital voting challenge,” said Tim Adamson director of Victoria Government.
Husain haider 