How The Technology Behind Bitcoin Could Change The Digital World As We Know It

Bitcoin has stormed the digital world as of late, working its way into everyday media like never before but it’s not the cryptocurrency ...

19:05 16 April 2018

Bitcoin has stormed the digital world as of late, working its way into everyday media like never before but it’s not the cryptocurrency itself that’s making its mark on the industry. While the rush to buy bitcoin is certainly worth following, if not getting involved with yourself, the technology, however, is truly a force to be reckoned with. Blockchain technology is changing how we do everything from our home systems, to how we make contracts but to what extent could we see this in the future? We’re exploring blockchain and just how it could affect the digital world as we know it below.

 

What Is The Blockchain?

 

Blockchain technology is giving us the opportunity to not only store anything of value, but encrypt it to ensure optimal security. The decentralised nature of this ledger makes it impossible to corrupt, forming a system that is not only fast and efficient, but one of the safest and most secure ways to store financial transactions that the world has ever seen. This distributed database is essentially duplicated across thousands upon thousands of computers, meaning that any hacking would need to occur across every single computer to completely bring down any blockchain network.

 

How Could It Change Technology?

 

There are countless potential ways that blockchain could change the way we live and conduct ourselves online, but some are more likely to occur further in the future than we can really speculate. However, some uses are much closer than we think, if not already in use. Here are just a few:

 

-Decentralised Internet

 

Cybersecurity is a hot topic across all areas of internet use nowadays, and developers are constantly looking for ways to improve our online safety. Blockchain has provided a new method of doing exactly that with a decentralised internet that could provide the height of security for anyone who uses it. The World Wide Web could become much more resilient by being distributed across nodes around the world. The best part? This is very much already underway, so we could see the implementation of such a technology sooner than you might think.

 

-Distributed Cloud Storage

 

In a similar way to a decentralised internet, decentralised cloud storage would promote far more secure operation of a simple online storage method. When there is one central company in control of your data, the chances of the corruption or stealing of data is unfortunately much higher. With blockchain, this cloud storage could be distributed and the data within it encrypted, making it far less vulnerable and unattainable by anyone without the right keys or software.

 

-Encryption

 

Blockchain technology is making data encryption easier than ever, and the digital industry could see this being used in everything from transaction ledgers to peer-to-peer messaging. Data can be encrypted into codes – also known as hashes – that can only be accessed with a private key. This way, our data will be more secure than ever before, which is certainly a common issue around the entire digital world.

Blockchain technology has the potential to shake up and change the digital world as we know it in ways that we might not expect. From faster, decentralised networks, to increased security, the improvements we could see are certainly worth watching.