What is Blockchain, is it the same as Bitcoin? The short answer is no so here is a bit of background about Blockchain and how it can help your business.

Blockchain  Explained

Let’s put this into normal language, when someone buys a product it is increasingly important for consumers and businesses alike to know exactly where that product came from and who has been involved in the process, not to mention where the products came from. Let’s consider the food industry, when you go into a restaurant to buy a burger, you want to know that the beef in the burger came from a sustainable source and not a ranch in the Amazon jungle that been created by destroying more the rain forest. Or imagine you are about to buy an expensive painting, it is absolutely crucial that you can establish the provenance, the documentation that authenticates the particular art piece, if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t but the painting. Using Blockchain you can prove that the painting exchanged hands legitimately to the current owner and all of the previous owners since the advent of Blockchain. Unfortunately, any changes prior to the creation of Blockchain couldn’t be tracked.

Before Blockchain was invented buyer’s would rely on a traditional paper trail including receipts, emails and other documentation to confirm a products’ authenticity. Then, with the development in modern technology, computers allowed authenticity to be stored in a distributed database that different buyers could have access to. But just imagine if an unscrupulous seller was able to change the records slightly, they could change the source of the beef you are buying from an Amazon cattle ranch to a more reputable and sustainable source; or change the authenticity of an almost worthless painting to appear as though it were a priceless work of art.

Blockchain has taken the development of the distributed database and breaks down the transaction trail into chunks. It then encrypts each chunk or block, this is assigned to the block owner before being linked in a chain in a chain of block owners, hence the term Blockchain. The encrypted nature of Blockchain is what makes it appealing to many businesses and therefore consumers like, as it provides secure identification of the process and ensures the validity of a purchase. 

Any Blockchain transaction can be made in standard currencies such as Dollar, Pound Sterling or Euro as well as not traditional crypto currencies such as Bittcoin.

The secret is setting up the Blockchain to provide your business with the right structure and supplier trail and this is where Metacube work with it’s customers. In our next post we will be explaining in more details what Blockchain is and how it has evolved as well as how Metacube can help you set it up for your business. If you want to know more before then contact Steve Fourace.