Blockchain
Blockchain Expo Berlin
Analyze attended the IoT and Blockchain Expo at the end of May in Berlin, Germany. It was a great opportunity to meet suppliers and build ties with software development and technology companies in Europe. Over the two days of the exhibition we had the chance to visit a number of stands and sit in on some of the talks across the 4 halls.
What struck us most was the momentum behind services built on Blockchain technology. A Blockchain (or chain of blocks) is a data system that records information, together with its full history, across a distributed set of nodes. Every change to the information is recorded using cryptographic techniques that link each record to the one before it. These change records are not stored on a single server but distributed across many machines. As a result, the historical information can be neither deleted nor altered. This is the technology underpinning Bitcoin and other platforms such as Ethereum. Beyond its use in Bitcoin, the technology promises to revolutionize a number of record-based processes: property registries, contracts, notary services and electronic voting.
In Chile we have not seen much discussion of this technology. There have been a few seminars on Bitcoin, mostly in academic circles. In the public sector there is no sign of any agency putting the topic on the table. One of the advantages of Blockchain is that its implementation does not require a central body to manage the data source, since the information is distributed; but it does require standardizing and regulating the implementation if the goal is, for example, to use Blockchain to replace notaries (political hurdles aside).
At Analyze we have used Blockchain in tests for the systems we build for our clients. At the IoT expo in Berlin we discovered BigChainDB, a database built on Blockchain, and attended several talks on developments in online gambling and SmartContracts.
For those interested in the subject we recommend the book "The Science of the Blockchain" by Roger Wattenhofer, which covers the (advanced) technical details of Blockchain, and the essential read "Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World". The Economist has published a series of related articles: The next big thing , A rush to patent the blockchain is a sign of the technology's promise, The trust machine.