Blockchain Technology: Industry Uses, Background, Purpose, and Value

Blockchain technology is a continuously growing record of blocks that are secured and linked with cryptography. It offers security, transparency, and cost reduction. Its purpose is to create a secure digital identity reference and enable online cryptocurrency payments. Its industry uses vary from finance to healthcare and government. Its value is in its immutability, security, redundancy, overhead/cost reduction, and accountability/transparency.

Contemporary Issues in
Digital and
Business Technologies

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Contents
INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................................2
Background of its development.........................................................................................................2
Purpose of this technology.................................................................................................................3
Industry uses of Blockchain...............................................................................................................3
Value/Contribution that this technology offers..................................................................................4
CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES......................................................................................................................................5
INTRODUCTION
Digital currencies have evolved into practice with the beginning of 21st century. Blockchain is
a similar technology which is a continuously growing record called blocks that are secured
and linked with cryptography (Swan, 2015). Each block has a cryptographic hash of the last

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block, transaction data and a timestamp. Data becomes inherently resistant to modification by
designing a block chain. It is a distributed ledger which is open and can record transactions
among two different parties efficiently and in a permanent and verifiable manner. For
utilising distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by the peer-peer network that
as a whole gets adhered to a protocol for internode communication and authenticating new
blocks. When a data is recorded once in a provided block then it cannot be changed
retroactively without the changes of all the subsequent blocks that need collusion of the
network majority. With a high Byzantine fault tolerance, block chain exemplifies a
computing network that is distributed.
A consensus has therefore being achieved through a blockchain and this is the reason why it
is more suitable for recording of medical records or events or other activities of records
management. Some of the common examples are transaction processing, food traceability,
identity management, voting or documenting provenance etc. It was invented in 2008 by
Japanese scientist Satoshi Nakamoto for utilising it in crypto currency bitcoin as its public
transaction ledger (Zyskind and Nathan, 2015). With the invention of Block chain it was the
first digital currency that solves the double spacing.
Background of its development
Block chain technology came into existence from the emergence of bitcoin from the year
2009 when a revolutionary paper by Satoshi Nakamoto was produced. Actually the work four
year back when Hal Finney produced the concept of “reusable proofs of work” a system that
utilised ideas from b-money along with computationally difficult Hashcash puzzles by Adam
Back to generate the concept for a crypto currency. It was running on the centralised trusted
backend system. Till the year 2017 it has become one of the most widely used
cryptocurrency. In 2014 bitcoin block chain file size reached 20GB, which reached to 30 GB
in 2015. In 2016-17 it reached to 50GB to 100G. Blockchain 2.0 has many kinds of new
applications where the users can exchange values without powerful intermediaries acting as
arbiters of information and money (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016).
Purpose of this technology
The major purpose of the blockchain technology is to create a secure digital identity
reference. The major thing behind the development of blockchain was to provide peer to peer
electronic cash system that helps in enabling online cyrptocurrency payments (Pilkington,
2016). Since there were many lags in the online electronic systems hence this technology

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provided a proper framework where the data related to transfer became more secured.
Another purpose of this technology development was to eliminate the middle regulatory
authority and the transaction is between the two parties. Apart from this there was a very
harsh need to have a secured data system as well as transparency in the maintenance of
records.
Industry uses of Blockchain
There are several ways in which block chain is utilised in various industries. From industry to
industry the use of Block chain varies. Without a central authority Blockchains stores data
immutable and decentral. The financial and other associated industries already understand the
cited technology’s disruptive potential and its application.
 Finance: In the financial industry, blockchain technology has many use cases that
includes restructuring the costly legacy workflows, free up capital and progressing
liquidity. Blockchain was utilised for enhancing transparency, decreasing
infrastructural cost, reduction in frauds (Vigna and Casey, 2016). It also increases
settlement times and execution.
 Retail and manufacturing: Better supply chain management, digital currencies and
contract platforms are provided by immense technology can give the retail and
manufacturing industries. It also provides cyber security options. Like processors,
distributors, customers, growers, regulators, retailers may potentially attain
permissioned access regarding the beginning and food product’s state in their
transactions and may easily trace out the contaminated foods to their source.
 Healthcare industry: This technology helps the consumers may certainly allow people
to have access to their records related to healthcare. It allows people to retract or
access a person from their healthcare records and certainly may have all the data
anchored, secured and encrypted on blockchain. By utilising this technology can even
remove third party verifiers like exchanges of health information directly linking
records of patients to financial and medical patrons (Iansiti and Lakhani, 2017). It
provides security to the medical records using healthcare administration.
 Government sector: In the governmental sector, blockchain technology must increase
the traceability and transparency of how currency is spent in governmental sector. It
must even track asset registration such as lessen fraud, vehicle and cost of operations.
With the increasing case of corruption in the government blockchain technology can
help in reducing such chances.

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As it can be seen from the above that for different industries the use of blockchain technology
differs so it can be said that it is highly beneficial. Since data is converting into gold these
days hence this technology needs to be upgrades so as to enhance the scope of its usability.
Value/Contribution that this technology offers
There is larger number of benefits that is added by the technology. There are many kinds of
value or contribution that is added by this technology. The long range contribution of this
technology helps every stakeholder in some or the other way. They add value in following
ways:
 Immutability: Making records and data unavailable at any central location can make it
difficult for the hackers to tamper with the data in any way. Since there is no location
on which data is stored hence making changes in them is not possible (Underwood,
2016).
 Security: There is no centralised data hence it is not possible that any kind of security
breach can be possible. Since there is no centralised system like the traditional servers
hence it is difficult to influence the system with malicious content. There is no single
server that is storing a data rather a series of servers at different locations have
blockchains. With the increasing number of nodes, more copies of a single data gets
created hence if anybody wants to tamper with data they will have to contaminate all
the servers or attack all the nodes. It adds value in the way that a more secured data
network is created where a certain amount of data gets stored and when it gets filled
then it is encrypted and sealed forever. Hacking all the nodes is not only impossible
but it is also very costly. The most interesting fact is that all the nodes have different
algorithms and security measures to provide more security (Crosby, et al., 2016).
 Redundancy: There are large numbers of copies generated in various parts of the
world hence if data at one place gets lost then also there is one copy available at other
places which are a relief for the shareholders (Walport, 2016).
 Overhead/cost reduction: Having such a large number of nodes to maintain this ledger
allows companies to offset and offload hosting, security and maintenance costs. It
eliminates a lot of costing of staffs of IT firms, infrastructural overhead and Dev Ops.
 Accountability/ Transparency: It brings transparency in the business as it helps in
making sure that whatever is logged or deployed on the blockchain is true and
accurate (Hackernoon, 2018).

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All these points illustrate the value that is added by the cited technology to the business of the
firm.
CONCLUSION
From the above report it can be concluded that Blockchain is a technology that helps in
making the data highly secured. This actually came into use with bitcoin. Since the data is
stored at multiple nodes hence it is highly secured and the chances of data loss are less. There
are many industries that are taking use of this technology as per their requirements. This
technology adds value to then comoany in many ways due to higher security of the network.
REFERENCES
Crosby, M., Pattanayak, P., Verma, S. and Kalyanaraman, V., (2016). Blockchain
technology: Beyond bitcoin. Applied Innovation, 2, pp.6-10.
Hackernoon, (2018). Why use the blockchain instead of a database? What gives token value?
[Online]. Available at: https://hackernoon.com/why-use-the-blockchain-instead-of-a-
database-what-gives-tokens-value-263449681153. [Accessed On: 15 April 2018].

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Iansiti, M. and Lakhani, K.R., (2017). The truth about blockchain. Harvard Business Review,
95(1), pp.118-127.
Pilkington, M., (2016). 11 Blockchain technology: principles and applications. Research
handbook on digital transformations, p.225.
Swan, M., (2015). Blockchain: Blueprint for a new economy. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".
Tapscott, D. and Tapscott, A., (2016). Blockchain revolution: how the technology behind
bitcoin is changing money, business, and the world. Penguin.
Underwood, S., (2016). Blockchain beyond bitcoin. Communications of the ACM, 59(11),
pp.15-17.
Vigna, P. and Casey, M.J., (2016). The age of cryptocurrency: how bitcoin and the
blockchain are challenging the global economic order. Macmillan.
Walport, M.G.C.S.A., (2016). Distributed ledger technology: Beyond blockchain. UK
Government Office for Science.
Zyskind, G. and Nathan, O., (2015), May. Decentralizing privacy: Using blockchain to
protect personal data. In Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2015 IEEE (pp. 180-184).
IEEE.

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