Summary:
For those who do not know, blockchain is essentially a decentralized entity (meaning that it is not tied to any company or government) that tracks the transactions of an individual digitally. You can think of it as a bank, but all in cyberspace. This is how people track their cryptocurrencies. Recently, the US treasury established a blog to offer advice for other government agencies to establish blockchain technology into their systems. The blog talks mainly about whether implementing blockchain will help the agency. As of when the pilot version started in October, many government officials praise the technology's ability to reduce fraud and increase efficiency.
Analysis:
Especially with all the hype around cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, I believe that blockchain is the future. Not only have many governments began implementation, but many companies have also saving them millions of dollars. Even though some people may doubt it because of the lack of any regulation and the fact that it is all stored in cyberspace, I believe that the power of instantaneous transactions makes it worth it. It just cuts out the banks which are an unnecessary middle man.
Questions:
- How do you feel about a decentralized currency, like bitcoin or another other cryptocurrency?
- What advantages and disadvantages to companies get from implementing blockchain technology?
- Are you okay with the government implementing this sort of technology?
5 comments:
The last two sentences of your analysis are misleading.
First, by design, blockchain does not offer instantaneous transaction time. Even altcoins like Monero that are designed to be faster than Bitcoin can still takes minutes to process.
Second, the blockchain doesn't remove the middle man, it IS the middle man! If I pay you in cash it's just me giving you money. If I pay you in cryptocurrency, an entire network of computers processes the transaction and charges a fee to make it worth their time.
That being said, I do believe the blockchain has great potential.
How do you feel about a decentralized currency, like bitcoin or another other cryptocurrency?
-i feel like decentralized money,especially online is a terrible idea. We have learned from the past that anything online can be hacked and taken. Putting money if anything would cause huge amounts of theft problem for the US
What advantages and disadvantages to companies get from implementing blockchain technology?
-The biggest thing for companies would be convenience. Money would be easier and faster to transfer, but other than that it would just be the fact that all the money is at the tip of your fingers. However, the possibility of corruption is not porportionate to the possible good out of them.
Are you okay with the government implementing this sort of technology?
While I don't necessarily like the idea of decentralized currency, I must acknowledge that it is evolving into a big thing that may eventually take the place of physical currency. Obviously companies can use blockchain technology to their advantage as it is convenient for them to track transactions and conducts transactions with ease. I don't see many negative side effects to the implementation of blockchain so I don't not support it.
I definitely feel that the lack of regulation and any sort of physical substance could hurt users' trust in cryptocurrency, but blockchain will definitely be more widely used in the future. My only issue is that the entire field of cryptocurrency relies on hashing algorithms that we can't prove are secure (See P vs. NP). Once SHA-256 is hacked, the value of Bitcoin will literally fall to zero.
I think that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are fantastic to the future of the world economy. Some cryptocurrencies have extremely fast transaction times. IE: Litecoin has been working on technology to have a transaction time within thirty seconds. I would also disagree with Josh Tong's claim about security. There are a lot of security measures that have been implemented for only currency. First and foremost, many crypto wallets are extremely hard to hack into and have very strong fire walls. Furthermore, people who are deeply invested have physical wallets where all their money is stored in a tether USB.
Post a Comment