Forbes: Blockchain Technology will Ultimately Disrupt Centralised and Cloud Based Storage Services

01.12.2015

There is no secret that many mainstream entities engaged in various activities are producing blockchain hype these days. Those in the crypto-community who like having their finger on the pulse of what is going on, are very well aware of expanding interest and adoption of bitcoin’s underlying technology amidst banks, traditional exchanges, and other influential organizations.

This contrasts with the picture we all had to deal with just a year ago. The mainstream attitude towards bitcoin and blockchain in those days could be more or less described as ‘ignore or roast’. Mainstream media was an important part of that paradigm: one had to seek carefully to find at least a couple of mentionings of something crypto-related, and even if succeeded, those would usually describe the whole tech as futile, stupid, and meaningless. The very word ‘tulipmania’ was used so often, nowadays it is perceived at least ironically.

However, our times are different. Major banks are dying to reseach and implement the blockchain technology. The European Court of Justice proclaimed bitcoin an equivalent of foreign currency. Investment in cryptospace has almost reached $1 billion. No wonder that such mainstream publications as Forbes eventually have to change the mood and cover the issue more positively.

Theo Priestley in his recent article for Forbes provides several predictions as to further development and propagation of the blockchain technology. For obvious reasons, the bigger part of the article is occupied by description of what the blockchain actually is – which is good, because better comprehension of the technology will provide the readers with sufficient awareness of the reasons for the hype. However, there is no need to reiterate his statements here, because all of them are too obvious. Notably, he states three functional advantages of a distributed ledger over traditional systems, being cost efficiency, almost ultimate client-side security, and increased speed as compared to traditional servers.

What is more important, in his article Mr. Priestly outlines the prospects for the blockchain technology in regard to its impact on existing policies and technologies widely employed nowadays.

“The strength behind Blockchain technology is in the authenticity of records, content and transactions, and its decentralised nature. Which opens up the possibilities of many use cases beyond FinTech,” he writes, and then adds four possible use cases for the blockchain, which apparently may become of demand any moment now. Those are Proof of ownership of digital purchases and content, proof of authorship of digital goods and content, digital trading, transaction history, transfer and ownership authenticity, and code authorship in application development.

“From a corporate point of view, this is invaluable and the backbone of the Industrial Internet,” he notes.

Those applications that go beyond the most popular and renowned, like the Internet of Things, to his reckoning, include a disruption in storage providing services, or, as Mr. Priestley puts it, upsetting “the apple cart among today’s storage providers.” Thinking of that, he wonders, how long contemporary cloud storage services will last in their current state.

He concludes his article with two predictions, which are as follows:

“Blockchain will become the lynchpin for security, data transactions and authentication for the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet.

Blockchain technology will ultimately disrupt centralised and cloud based storage services.”

Such an article may be a small step, as it hardly expands any horizons for the fintech community. However, it does its part in spreading the word and teaching the basics of the upcoming technological disruption, which also is of importance these days.

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Tags: blockchain, Forbes