How will using blockchain be in the future

Ever wondered how will using blockchain be in the future? Find out how using blockchain is getting more popular and how it will be used in the future.
Following topics will be discussed in this article:

Table of contents

Digitalisation of our world economy

Our world economy still needs a lot of work before it is digitalised. In fact, have you ever tried to access your medical data? Similarly, have you ever tried to access your vaccine history?
Is it even possible staying home? #covid19 #CoronaVirus
If one thing was taught with the corona virus pandemic, it is that many businesses are not yet ready for full digitalisation. But what if this changed drastically over the next decade?

Distributed governance schemes

Distributed governance is the specification of principles and methods to enable scalable coordination and to legitimate decisions. In such systems, all participants are [usually] treated equally, without the presence of a central authority.

Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain.

Vitalik Buterin, core contributor of Ethereum.

The challenge is how to maintain and implement changes in such an organization. Because there is no decision maker to manage and allocate resources. In fact, management in such structures is done through the process of signalling, proposing and distributed decision making.
Example of things that can be governed:

  • Monetary policies
  • Brands, trademarks
  • Protocol source code
  • Organizations

Future with artificial intelligence

The past decade has witnessed the great rise of Artificial Intelligence. The technology has made an impact in almost every field out there. It has become a great superpower which has changed the way we interact, and in the future, it may change the way we live our lives.
The two major reasons for the rapid growth of AI in this decade are:

  1. Data — Thanks to the Internet and IoT devices the amount of data generated is growing exponentially.
  2. Compute — The hindrance that we faced in the previous decades was solved. Many companies have started creating hardware specifically for training Deep Learning models.

Following are some of the achievements done with artificial intelligence over the past decade:

  • 2010: Microsoft launched the Kinect: The first gaming device that tracked the human body movement using a 3D camera and infrared detection.
  • 2011: IBM’s Watson wins at Jeopardy: In 2011, a natural language question answering computer competed and Jeopardy and defeated two former champions.
  • 2013: NEIL, the Never Ending Image Learner: Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is a computer program that works 24/7 learning information about images that it finds on the internet.
  • 2014: Tesla Motors announced AutoPilot: Model S cars equipped with this system are capable of lane control with autonomous steering, braking, and speed limit adjustment based on signals image recognition.
  • 2015: Google open-sourced Tensorflow: TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source platform for machine learning. It has a comprehensive, flexible ecosystem of tools, libraries and community resources.
  • 2016: AlphaGo beats World Champion: Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol at Go four out of five times.
  • 2017: Facebook AI Language: The Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab trained two “dialog agents” to converse with each other. However, as the chatbots conversed, they diverged from human language and invented their own language — exhibiting artificial intelligence to a great degree.
  • 2019: Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand: OpenAI has successfully trained a robot hand called Dactyl that adopted to the real-world environment in solving the Rubik’s cube. The robot was entirely trained in the simulated environment but was able to transfer the knowledge into a new situation successfully.

It is clear out of this list, that the industry is moving on the computation side. Yet, there is still progress to do in terms of distributing data that is used by artificial intelligence algorithm.
This is how blockchain will be used in the future as it provides with a redundant and transparent data storage scheme. In fact, improving the verifiability of data that is used and produced by AI has a great potential to create value.

Blockchain and digital identities

The transition to a digital economy requires radically different identity systems. In a world that’s increasingly governed by digital transactions and data, our existing methods for managing security and privacy are no longer adequate.
Data breaches, identity theft and large-scale fraud are becoming more common. In addition, a significant portion of the world’s population lacks the necessary digital credentials to fully participate in the digital economy.
Read our article Reasons why using blockchain is getting more popular in the past decade to find out how blockchain can help prevent scams through cryptographic proofs.
Identity plays a major role in everyday life. Think about going to an office, getting on a plane, logging to a website or making an online purchase. While all around us, we generally don’t pay much attention to our identity credentials unless something goes wrong. But, it’s a highly complex and interesting subject.
What is identity? Whether physical or digital in nature, identity is a collection of individual information or attributes that describe an entity and is used to determine the transactions in which the entity can rightfully participate. Identities can be assigned to three main kinds of entities:

  • Individuals, the entity we most associate with the word “identity”;
  • Legal entities, like corporations, partnerships, and trusts; and
  • Assets, which can be tangible, e.g., cars, buildings, smartphones; or intangible, e.g., patents, software, data sets.

Using transparent data storages

If one were to try and visualise the modern world economy, it might resemble the tangle of cables behind a computer or television.
The supply chains that carry goods from producers to consumers weave across and around each other, stretching over borders and oceans. A product may pass through several countries before it takes its place on a retail shelf, awaiting purchase.
Globalization has benefits, both to developing economies and to international peace, but a consequence of global trade is that consumers often have little insight into where the goods they buy come from, or how they are produced.

With blockchain technology, data is distributed and nearly incorruptible
Blockchain can be a confusing concept, lying as it does at the intersection of cryptography and finance, two fields known for being impenetrable. Put simply, a blockchain is an example of a distributed ledger, a record of transactions of which a copy is given to anyone who wants one, and every copy stays up to date.
With blockchain, everyone has an identical copy of the ledger. Whenever a transaction occurs via blockchain, other computers on that network verify that the transaction is valid and add it to the ever growing log that is the blockchain itself.
However, blockchain technology is not a cost-effective way of storing data. Because it is complicated to delete data on a blockchain, nodes will need to process ever increasing amounts of data when validating. This uses larger amounts of energy, and thus money.
As solution to the above is that while a blockchain layer handles things like immutably storing data fingerprints and handling transactions between users and nodes in the network. The bulk of the data can stored on an off-chain data layer to reduce the footprint in the blockchain data storage.

Applications to reward users

Is there any way to rearrange the online economy to promote collaboration and fair use of each other’s platforms and services?
Blockchain provides a solution to align the interests of all parties involved. In blockchain, a distributed network of stakeholders replace centralized authorities and gatekeepers that previously owned services. Providers and users mutually own and maintain services that run on blockchain. In return, they share the profits that the services generate.
Design elements as simple as providing helpful information about options (or not) and making it easy for users to find and navigate toward their best choice (or not) have a big impact not only on what users do once they get to a platform, but also on whether they show up at all.
From Bitcoin miner rewards, to transaction fee-setting mechanisms, to storage fees, and to prediction markets – incentives are everywhere in blockchain platforms. Incentive design is a critical part of the overall economic design of effective blockchain platforms. It is the piece that builds on a platform’s value proposition and structures the system for which the token of the platform will be designed.

Summary

Closing down, let’s look at a Student’s data in the following example of how will blockchain be used in the future: Students can use an application that stores their course credits and skills learned over time irrespective of institutions, on a blockchain. Augmenting availability and access to their own data, students would be incentivised to participate. Since this data contributes back to the larger system, the network would pay them commensurately based on how much of their data is used in order to create value. Considerations like certification of the content, pricing and other factors need to be analysed as part of the exercise.
We hope that reading this article helped so that you understand how using blockchain will be in the future!
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