Are Blockchains in Your Company’s Future?

As if CEOs didn’t already have enough digital disruption to worry about, the blockchain is yet another “game-changing” new technology to cope with. The good news is we believe this technology is much more friend than foe. Because of its security, transparency and potential to dramatically reduce transaction costs, it could usher in a future worth embracing.

This article is an in-depth companion to our article in CEO World found here, and outlines blockchain’s key features in non-technical terms and describes some business use cases happening now. We believe understanding these important concepts will allow executives to envision how they might put blockchains to work in their own companies or industries.

What’s the Big Idea?

Most people know by now that blockchain technology was originally developed to support the bitcoin ecosystem. Bitcoin developers’ ongoing ambition is to provide an unregulated and highly decentralized currency requiring no central bank. The key requirements of such a system are daunting: the transaction records must be transparent so anyone can verify them and it must be “trustless”, meaning parties do not have to know or trust one another to transact. It must be virtually unhackable, and it must be highly distributed across a set of independent computers so failures or attacks on some do not affect the integrity of the whole. Finally, it must be open-source, so that anyone can download the code and become a participant.