Blockchain technology is developing rapidly, and IEEE is planning to formulate industry standards

According to The Institute under IEEE, blockchain technology is well-known for its role as the core of Bitcoin electronic currency transactions, security authentication, and open and transparent decentralized operation processes. Everyone using the blockchain technology system can clearly see the details of the transaction, and it is difficult for outsiders to attack and damage the account. This high level of security is why it has strong application potential in the field of digital payments. In the near future, this technology may also be widely used in areas such as protecting medical records and voting.

However, the number of people dedicated to blockchain technology research is relatively small. Therefore, the IEEE formed a special blockchain group last month to provide continuing education courses for those who are interested in blockchain technology research and development and promote the formulation of standards for the technology.

“Blockchain’s potential is nearly limitless and it is undeniably a disruptive force,” said Alpesh Shah, senior director of global business strategy and intelligence at the IEEE Standards Association. “For many industries, the time has come to embrace the transformation that blockchain can bring.”
Over the past seven years, the technology has been used in the bitcoin world to track digital payments because it can store digital information securely on the internet, making it difficult to tamper with.

The blockchain system is divided into blocks. A block is a database that records transactions, and the other is a network of "miners" - users of the database who continuously add blocks to the system. Since the blockchain is designed so that the previous transaction will be blocked after the next transaction is generated, it is almost impossible for the outside world to go back to the previous transaction and make changes. This is its immutability, which can effectively avoid the occurrence of transaction disputes.

Peter Kirby, director of Factom, a service provider that helps developers build applications using blockchain technology, explained the security of the technology in an IEEE Spectrum article. "It's like you're building a huge wall," he said, and every time someone creates a new task, "you're laying thousands of bricks on it, which means that if someone wants to change one of the bricks at the base of the wall, it's extremely difficult."

Due to the special nature of its architecture, blockchain has much more security and trust than banks. In comparison, blockchain relies on a completely unfamiliar universal network to build a distributed public ledger, and can use user public /private key encryption to further ensure the security of each transaction and verification. Each encrypted distributed ledger will be connected to other ledgers in the system.

Therefore, if a hacker wants to break into an account, he has to get all the accounts connected to it at the same time. According to the current technical level, that is definitely not worth the loss.

However, blockchain technology has not been widely adopted in other industries, partly because it is difficult to use. Because of this, third-party services have emerged to help people make bitcoin transactions without actually using the blockchain.

Jonathan Mohan, founder of the BitcoinNYC Meetup and another member of the IEEE blockchain ad hoc community, predicted that banks, health care providers and other companies in other industries will make blockchain systems easy enough for anyone to use.

The application potential of blockchain is no longer limited to Bitcoin

Mohan said healthcare is a natural match for the technology because medical records must be secure and accessible.

In a blockchain medical record system, people will not be able to change previous entries. For example, they cannot tamper with a diagnosis recorded several years ago, and these records are easily accessible to medical staff and patients. In addition, because the blockchain is an anonymous public database, medical staff can use the data in it for scientific research without having to worry about privacy issues.

The anonymous nature of blockchain is also an attractive application for electronic voting. Because the system can count votes immediately, you can see in real time how many votes each candidate has received. The Danish Liberal Alliance is the first organization to use blockchain technology for electronic voting, and Ukraine plans to try it this year.

But before all this can be achieved, we still have to solve many problems to clear the way for its development.

Education and training for professionals

Shah said there is also a pressing need to train blockchain programmers. Currently, there are about 500 developers in the industry, but Shah expects the demand for professionals to rise to around 100,000 soon. These newcomers will need training and certification.

Establishment and compliance with standards

As the benefits of this technology continue to grow, there will be some companies in the industry that try to take advantage of the situation. For example, a company that is not a blockchain technology company blatantly uses blockchain as a banner to make money. At this time, we need a standard. The goal of the IEEE Blockchain Special Community is to ensure that different companies are compatible with each other when they are developing blockchain systems for the same purpose.

Greg Adamson, senior member of IEEE and chairman of the blockchain community, said that before the benefits of blockchain can be captured by the industry, we need to establish unified standards. "In many cases, the unification of standards can save companies a lot of trouble and security risks."