Book review of Blockchain: the next everything

Blockchain has been the centre of lots of discussions recently, especially since last year. The book “Blockchain: The Next Everything” was published in March 2019, right at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. I bought the book in August 2020 when I started diving in the space and wanted to have something to read to begin my journey. However, I didn’t end up reading this particular book because I soon found that there is tremendous information readily available on the internet, I put this book away on the shelf collecting dust.

This Christmas break I finally thought about reading this book. It gave me an interesting feeling as I seem to be digging from the past as a historian. Things move so fast in the space that a book published a year or two ago now seems outdated. Still, I found that the author mentioned a number of companies or platforms across the book using blockchain to make a difference. I have not yet looked them up to see if they are still operating well or have been growing bigger (some have become big names in the space for sure), but I’d like to list them here for anyone who is interested in taking a closer look later.

Issues blockchain can help address/resolve

• healthcare records/sensitive patient information sharing
• implement UBI in under-developed regions
• give access to banks/financial systems to the poor
• generate ID for refugees
• ensuring authenticity/order in voting while largely reduce manpower required
• build tracking system that promotes transparency, social responsibilities, ethical trading from farmer/manufacturers to distributors and to the end consumers
• proof of provenance for food, art work, and many other commodities
• fractionalize of ownership for things that cost a fortune to own as a whole
• proof of ownership of art piece, land title, data, and other things
• consumers taking back the consensus of whether to give out their data, and have the possibilities of making a profit for trading their personal information and data
• reduce settlement cost, prevent fraudulent transactions –> potentially take over the double-entry bookkeeping system (said to be created by Luca Pacioli)

It is quite interesting to see that some of the ideas now have become realities. Proof of ownership and fraction ownership is something people involved in NFT feel very familiar with. Some other concepts that at the time the book was written still need a whole paragraph to describe and now have become realities are: Dex (decentralized exchange platform), tokenomics and gamefi (these words that are now been underscored by the spelling-correction functionality will soon be added to dictionaries, I believe), which allow people to earn and produce economic incentives by participating in gaming or other social-economic activities.

Platforms & companies using blockchain

Throughout the book, the author mentioned some companies that use different platforms to integrate blockchain technology in different areas. The use case is vast, from traditional financial services to humanity program such as helping refugees to get IDs, or from one of the most research-intensive industries such as medical research, to the less addressed sex industry. Blockchain can provide a solution. Some companies and platforms mentioned are:

• Cargill: use blockchain to help consumers track the provenance of their meat product
• IBM: use Hyperledger Fabric framwork to build private chain for big operations and enterprises
• artist Kevin Abosch claims to create blockchain tokens for all the streets in Manhattan and sell them for a price –> now seems to be the prototype of MANA, which allows virtual land ownership
• Fura, Everledger, DeBeers, these jewellery companies use blockchain to track diamonds from mining to sale, and to prevent unethical activities during the process, such as trafficking
• Dust, a company use diamond dust to create “fingerprints”, which can be used to mark anything with a unique code. Similarly, IBM uses readable “DNA” pellets to store information of the goods that these pellets attached to
• Meridio, a Brooklyn company is doing fractional sell for real estate
• BitRewards, Blockpoint: two companies working in using blockchain to build universal tokens that can be used across different platforms and reward programs
• Codex Protocol: a company that provides proof of provenance for artwork and collectables sold in auction
• Statis: an ICO advisory firm that conducts studies on ICOs (their findings indicate that even the majority (80%) of 2017 ICOs were scams, most people avoided them, and only 11% of money went down to the drain with scam ICOs)
• Gem, MedRec, BitMED: startups that working in healthcare with blockchain, involving medical records, consent to share information, etc. BitMED even offers people free medical care in exchange for the right to sell their data to drug and medical device companies
• CryptoKitties: blockchain games (and now NFT)
• Circles, a Berlin startup let ppl create their own individual cryptocurrency to use in a so called “postcapitalist economic system” based o collaborative interactions
• terra0 framework on Ethereum network, is designed to help forest participate in DAOs by helping forest manage themselves, sell timber and acquire more land
• Binded: a company that helps people to lock their uploaded image to blockchain using a hash to create an immutable record (sounds like NFT to me)
• LegalFling: a phone app using blockchain to ensure consensus in sex industry
• Intimate: uses blockchain to help sex workers getting paid in a private way
• Exo: has a number of products that allow couples far apart to interact with each other with added privacy brought by blockchain technology
• Project Chicago: a group advocates sharding, to overcome the slow and overloaded blockchain transaction issues
• uPort: uses blockchain to ensure self-sovereignty of one’s identity, which one can later on use to participate in other activities happening in blockchain
• Accenture and Microsoft: two giants that UN is working with to provide blockchain ID for refugees (a program called ID2020) and help UN achieve one of its sustainable development goals
• Blockchain for Change: a project in NY trying to provide workable IDs to homeless people
• Voatz: developed a system built on blockchain for voting, which is tested in May 2018 during the state’s primary elections for West Viginia.
• Wanxiang: an automobile company in China that announced a big investment over the next several years in blockchain for smart cities. Wanxiang is also building a massive lab to promote blockchain innovations in Hangzhou
• Dubai government: is investing heavily in blockchain and is hoping to implement it in various scenarios and infrastructures to build a smart city
• R3CEV: a group formed by a few dozen banks to standardize the technology for fintech blockchains, in order to communicate between banks more easily.
• Maersk: the shipping giant collaborates with IBM to build a system using Hyperledger for their supply chain, which brings more transparency as the movement and costs of the goods along the supply chain becomes easier to track
• Provenance, a UK company uses blockchain to ensure that food is what the label claimed, so called “hook to fork”
• Energy Blockchain Lab, collaborates with IBM to build a trading platform for carbon assets

Self-sovereignty

Although above are a lot of industry giants and startups who are pushing the use case of blockchain technology to the society, at the end of the day, technology gets every one of use involved, not just these company entities. You can always choose to participate in blockchain in your own way, which could be using their label to track down the provenance of things you purchase (or decide not to purchase), or you can decide to sell some of your personal information in exchange of other services. The choice is on you. Blockchain brings self-sovereignty back on:

• personal identity
• work and intellectual properties that one produces
• transactions and data that come from one participating in social-economic activities