The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology

As contrasted with the Web where an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) request is sent to the server, with blockchain apps, the network makes a request to the blockchain.

We can also think of blockchains as a shared infrastructure that is like a utility. If you think about how the current Internet infrastructure is being paid for, we subsidize it by paying monthly fees to Internet service providers. As public blockchains proliferate and we start running millions of smart contracts and verification services on them,

But the blockchain is a different construct. It is more of a new protocol that sits on top of the Internet, just as the World Wide Web sits on top of the Internet via its own technology standards.

The blockchain attacks some old intermediaries: central counterparty clearinghouses, notaries, escrow services, and any services with a built-in trust component. While the blockchain chips away at some functions from these existing intermediaries, it also enables the creation of new players.

As such, you would be creating a smart property, which is an asset or thing that knows who owns it. A smart property does not have to be a digital-only product. It can be a physical object or thing that was made “smart” through an explicit or implicit linkage to a blockchain. There are thousands of such examples, including a lock, a car, a fridge,

That new layer is mostly about trust, so we could call it the trust layer.

Proving that something has happened will be served by blockchains. There will be millions of such cases, with access rivalling the way we google for information.

We have transactions that can get validated without a third party. Now, you’re thinking—how about databases? We have always thought that databases are trusted repositories for holding assets. In the case of the blockchain, the ledger is that irrefutable record that holds the register of transactions that have been validated by the blockchain networ

If there is one main point that I will keep drilling upon, it is to emphasize that the blockchain is not one item, thing, trend, or feature. It is many pieces all at once, some of them working together, and others independently.

The theory is attractive: publish your medical record safely on the blockchain and be assured that you or an authorized person can access it anywhere in the world.