In recent months, we have received innumerable requests to share our thoughts and insight into a new industry that has been gaining steam and garnering increasing interest:  Blockchain cryptocurrency. It is now our pleasure to show that we’ve been listening.

The field is increasing every day, to the extent that today Cornell, MIT, and UC Berkeley (among many others) now offer programs in Blockchain and cryptocurrency, and the courses regularly overflow their most robust lecture halls. The average salary is around 80k for a Blockchain Developer. It is no overstatement to say that Blockchain-related fields are among the strongest to emerge for up and coming professionals.

Blockchain_graphic_blue

Technology writer and enthusiast, Chantelle Lafaille, reached out to us to help expound on the subject, and it is our pleasure to feature her contributions (her whole article, “What is Blockchain Technology”, may be found here, and we encourage all our readers and colleagues to read the piece).

The strength (and subsequent value) of Blockchain processes is in its fundamental incorruptibility, and deals not only in virtual currency, but encompasses contracts, records, and virtually anything else of intrinsic business value. Each addition (verified for complete and trustworthy legitimacy) appends the ledger, thus enhancing the value of the whole. Moreover, the core of the Blockchain’s utility is in its complete transparency and decentralization. There is no chance of corruption within the chain, as there is no centralized, singular holder of the information; it is an ever-growing dataset that is fully public and therefore may be cross-checked at every level.

As Lafaille puts it:

“Because it uses a peer-to-peer network, copies of the ledger are stored in many different locations, and unless you manage to track down every single one of them (Bitcoin is estimated to have over 35,000 nodes in its P2P network), you can’t destroy it. As well, because so many different, independent nodes are keeping track of the ledger,” Lafaille continues, “modifying it in an untrustworthy way won’t go very far because all the other nodes will disagree with that transaction and won’t add it to the ledger.”

Every active participant has real-time open access, utterly barring the possibility of behind-closed-doors malfeasance. Therefore, we can see the fundamental strengths:  Blockchained processes cannot be manipulated and distorted by any single individual and has no single point of critical failure.

Lafaille breaks down the blockchain process succinctly in three steps:

  1. Blockchain maintains a data exchange record — also known as a “ledger” in the cryptocurrency-world, and an individual exchange of data is identified as a “transaction“. Each verified transaction is then added to the ledger as a “block”.
  2. It employs a disseminated system (or a “peer-to-peer network of nodes”) in order to verify or authenticate each transaction.
  3. New transactions cannot be altered once they’ve been signed and verified, and subsequently added to the blockchain.

Blockchain Wordcloud

A few pertinent notes on Bitcoin: as of last year, the total value of the Bitcoin digital currency was estimated to be around 9 billion USD. Transactions in 2016 averaged over $200,000 US daily. Bitcoin came to be in 2008, and since that time, has been under continual operation without a single major instance of systemic disruption, due to its underlying principles.

Make no mistake:  Decentralization is the way of the future, representing the next step forward in the Internet and global connectivity.

As we’ve said in the past (and have no qualms reiterating):  The clever executive is always on the top of shifting markets and the paradigm shifts that open wide the doors of new, innovative industry.

And again, we strongly encourage all our readers to head over to Lafaille’s informative article, What is Blockchain Technology for an educational and engaging read.

 

Fred Coon, CEO

Stewart, Cooper & Coon, has helped thousands of decision makers and senior executives move up in their careers and achieve significantly improved financial packages within short time frames. Contact Fred Coon – 866-883-4200, Ext. 200