Beyond Bitcoin: ‘Blockchain is Coming to Disrupt Your Industry,’ Says Deloitte

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by Tatsiana Yablonskaya · 3 min read
Beyond Bitcoin: ‘Blockchain is Coming to Disrupt Your Industry,’ Says Deloitte
Deloitte is one of the 'Big Four' and the largest professional services network in the world by revenue in FY2014 and the largest by the number of professionals. Deloitte provides audit, tax, consulting, enterprise risk and financial advisory services with more than 225,400 professionals in over 150 countries. Photo: Madalina Seghete/Flickr

Deloitte insists that if properly applied, blockchain has potential to enhance financial services.

The most popular thing about blockchain that we have been facing over and over again sounds like “this technology is able to turn this world around”. One more expert opinion comes from Deloitte University Press.

The source, known for original articles, reports, and periodicals concerning business, public sector and NGOs, advices to speed on blockchain as “the technology can potentially make a great many things more secure and accountable: financial transactions, micropayments, IoT applications, health records, corporate audits, and more”. Some time ago Deloitte has partnered with the Israeli coloured coins startup Colu to boost the use of the blockchain technology in different sectors.

The intense interest in blockchain that we have been observing recently, is quite understandable. It offers to record transactions or any digital interaction in a secure, transparent, auditable and efficient way thus giving a possibility to enhance financial services and enabling new business models. The technology is studied by experts all over the world and various companies and banks strive to use it for their own benefit.

Deloitte enumerates a set of indisputable advantages:

  • Reliable and available. Blockchain is designed to be resilient in the face of outages or attacks. If any node in a network of participants fails, the others will continue to operate, maintaining the information’s availability and reliability.
  • Transparent. Transactions on the blockchain are visible to its participants, increasing auditability and trust.
  • Immutable. It is nearly impossible to make changes to a blockchain without detection, increasing confidence in the information it carries and reducing the opportunities for fraud.
  • Irrevocable. Blockchain allows making transactions irrevocable, which increases the accuracy of records and simplify back-office processes.
  • Digital. Almost any document or asset can be expressed in code and encapsulated or referenced by a ledger entry. This characteristic explains a wide variety of spheres where blockchain can be applied.

Wired echoes that bitcoin went beyond the notion of only a digital currency long ago. The conversation has shifted from curiosity, confusion and doubt to one in which serious decision-makers are recognizing the many ways blockchain ledgers can be used.

According to a 2013 report from McKinsey and Company, open data – freely accessible, machine-readable data provided by governments – can help unlock more than $1.1 trillion in economic value in the US and $2.6 trillion globally. And it’s blockchain that can become a crucial piece of infrastructure for governments to implement what we call “responsive open data” – data that responds to the commands of citizens when and where they want it. However it’s critical that transactions, contracts and documents are verified on a globally accessible public ledger. It will ensure that the information stored on it won’t be deleted or manipulated by any person, institution or government. Otherwise, a poorly designed blockchain system can fall into the hands of a bad government or actor, which will lead to drastic consequences.

Wired doesn’t deny the existence of challenges in implementing of blockchain. Its decentralized nature makes search for information on the blockchain difficult. It’s also not so easy to connect public keys to real-world individuals. However, the problem of blockchain’s reliability refers more to security systems of particular companies. The risk that hackers can steal bitcoin doesn’t discredit the underlying core protocol itself.

We will hear many more opinions that blockchain can become a way to data reliability and interoperability. But there will always be those who doubt. Blockchain still has to be properly studied to unlock its full potential.

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