According to IEEE’s The Institute news, blockchain technology is known for its core role as bitcoin electronic currency transactions, security authentication, and open and transparent decentralized operational processes. Everyone using the blockchain technology system can clearly see the details of the transaction, and it is difficult for the outside world to attack and destroy the account. This high degree of security is the reason why it has strong potential for application in the digital payment field. In the near future, the technology will also be widely used to protect medical records and voting elections.
However, a relatively small part of the population is devoted to blockchain technology research. As a result, the IEEE formed a special blockchain group last month to provide continuing education courses for those who are interested in the development of blockchain technology and to promote the standardization of the technology.
“The potential of the blockchain is almost limitless, and it will undeniably create a disruptive force,†said Alpesh Shah, senior director of the IEEE Standards Association’s global business strategy and intelligence department. “For many industries, accept the blockchain. The changes brought about can be described as the time of maturity."
In the past seven years, this technology has been applied to track digital payments in the bitcoin world because of its hard to tamper nature, it can safely store digital information on the Internet.
The blockchain system is divided into blocks. One block is a database for recording transactions, and the other is the "miner" network, a database user, who constantly adds blocks to the system. Because the design of the blockchain is that the previous transaction will be blocked after the latter transaction is generated, it is almost impossible for the outside world to go back to the previous transaction and make changes. This is an indispensable modification and can effectively avoid the occurrence of trade disputes.
Peter Kirby, a Factom director who specializes in developing applications for developers using blockchain technology, explained the security of this technology in an IEEE Spectrum article. "It's like you're building a huge wall," he said. Every time someone creates a new mission, "you're equivalent to building thousands of bricks on it, that is, whoever wants to It's extremely difficult to change one brick in the wall."
Because of its particular architecture, blockchain has more security and trust insurance than banks. In contrast, the blockchain relies on a completely unfamiliar, general-purpose network to build a distributed public ledger, and it enables the use of user public/private key encryption to further ensure the security of each transaction and verification. Each encrypted distributed ledger is connected to other books in the system.
Therefore, if a hacker wants to break an account, he or she will have to deal with all accounts connected to it. According to the current level of technology, it must be worth the candle.
However, blockchain technology has not been widely used in other industries, partly because it is difficult to use. And because of this, there are third-party services on the market to help people make Bitcoin transactions without having to really use the blockchain.
Bitcoin NYC Meetup founder Jonathan Mohan and another member of the IEEE blockchain ad hoc community predicted that banks, health care providers and other industry companies will make the blockchain system easy enough for everyone Go to use.
The application potential of blockchain has long been not limited to BitcoinMohan said that healthcare is a natural match for this technology because medical records must be secure and accessible.
In a blockchain medical record system, people will not be able to change previous items. For example, they cannot tamper with a diagnosis recorded a few years ago. These records are easily accessible to healthcare workers and patients. In addition, since the blockchain is an anonymous public database, medical personnel can use the data contained therein to conduct scientific research without worrying about privacy issues.
The anonymous nature of the blockchain is also an attractive application for electronic voting transactions. Because the system can count votes immediately, it can see how many votes each candidate gets in real time. The Danish Freedom League is the first organization to use blockchain technology for electronic voting. Ukraine plans to try this year.
But before all this is achieved, we must solve many problems to clear the way for its development.
Professional education and trainingShah said that the needs of training blockchain programmers are also very urgent. There are currently about 500 developers in the industry, but Shah expects that demand for professionals will soon rise to around 100,000. These new people need training and certificates.
Standard establishment and complianceWith the growing interest in this technology, there will be no shortage of companies that are in troubled waters, such as a company that is obviously not a blockchain technology company, but brazenly uses the blockchain as its banner to generate wealth. At this time we need a standard. The goal of the IEEE Blockchain Special Community is to ensure that they are compatible with each other when different companies are developing blockchain systems for the same purpose.
Greg Adamson, senior member of the IEEE and chairman of the blockchain community, said that before the benefits of the blockchain are captured by the industry, we need to establish a unified standard. "In many cases, the unification of standards can give companies a lot of trouble and security risks."