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Financial applications and use cases dominate the blockchain industry and the sphere of cryptocurrency. When people talk about cryptocurrency, they almost always talk about the "currency" aspect and how it will revolutionize the current global financial system.
We expect this, since Bitcoin was the first successful cryptocurrency, designed to be a digital cash (a currency), as outlined in The whitepaper of Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then other cryptocurrencies have followed the example, making blockchain financial applications and cases of use a very strong benchmark in the industry.
Non-financial blockchain applications
Blockchain technology applications apply to a wide range of use cases other than financial applications such as supply chain management, health care and identity management, to name a few.
Touching on this topic, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and nominee of Ethereum, recently tweeted about the non-financial applications of blockchains.
1. Time for a brief tweetstorm on non-financial applications of blockchain. Because the scalability of blockchain improves and improves and UX improves and the rates decrease as a result, this becomes an ever larger part of the story.
– Vitalik non-donor of ether (@VitalikButerin) 10 December 2018
The Twitter thread continues for 15 tweets of Buterin, followed by a vigorous debate and comments from cryptic and enthusiastic crypts from Buterin himself.
The thread starts with Buterin explaining that the various aspects of the blockchain are improving more and more including scalability, user experience (UX) and costs. He says these things will have a big impact on the industry.
Buterin then explains an unpopular way of viewing blockchain, stating that:
An unappreciated way to view blockchains is like an extension of cryptography that does different things. Encryption allows you to encrypt data, prove that data has been signed by someone, etc. Etc. blockchains OTOH allows to prove that a data has not * been * published.
The above quote shows how blockchains are used for a series of use cases surrounding the verification. He said that using the cryptographic aspect of the blockchain by itself, you can check things on the chain to check the validity of such things.
He provided simple examples of use blockchain technology for cryptographic verification including an app for the verification of university degrees, the revocation of keys in self-sufficient identity and the verification of the integrity of offers during an auction.
Vitalik on the future of Blockchains
Following his proclamation of use cases and examples, Buterin has touched on the importance of public blockchains and how they will become much more feasible:
Public blockchains have a real competitive advantage over centralized servers and consortium chains in terms of credible reporting of neutrality. At this time it seems that benefits like this may not be worth the costs of public chains, but they are only today's public chains …
In his next tweet, Buterin explained that soon, game test and sharding will be thousands of times more efficient, so putting more and more stuff in the chain will be acceptable. He used an example of blockchains to become so efficient that he predicts things like daily shopping receipts to be posted on blockchain. Buterin says that blockchains will become the simplest tool to obtain verifiability guarantees, non-double spending, etc.
To end his thread, Buterin said the blockchain and cryptocurrency community should take non-financial blockchain applications more seriously as they could pave the way for more important financial implementations of technology.
Non-financial applications have an advantage over financial ones in an important sense: there is less at stake if they break, so there are fewer reasons to worry about having them fairly quickly. So they could be the first widely distributed applications, especially in institutional settings.
What do you think of the applications and the cases of use mentioned by Vitalik? Are you in agreement with him? Let us know in the comments section below.
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