Blockchain, Big Data, Internet of Things—Are You Ready to Embark on the Golden Road?

Disruption - in today's business or technology discussions, if the word is not involved, then it is impossible to proceed. I think "disruption" has become an unwritten rule, as if no one will take you seriously unless you come up with some disruptive business ideas or some disruptive technology that can promote business development or provide competitive advantage.

Take big data and the Internet of Things as examples. These two technologies are at the top of the list of disruptive technologies. Most of these disruptive technologies can cause synergies in the industry and ultimately pave a golden road to real business value.

Blockchain joins the disruptive conversation

Recently, a new topic has become active in the disruptive dialogue: blockchain technology. So there are a series of questions about blockchain technology: What exactly is blockchain technology? How does blockchain technology provide business value? Will blockchain technology affect my current plans? Does blockchain technology cause any synergies? Or do I need to worry about being killed by blockchain technology?

What is blockchain? How does it relate to Bitcoin?

If you use Google to search for the keyword "blockchain", you will inevitably find that "blockchain" and "bitcoin" appear together in many results. This is because blockchain technology is the underlying technology of digital currencies such as Bitcoin. As you know, Bitcoin has no physical form. Bitcoin is not controlled by a single entity or requires the support of a government or institution.

Permanent digital transaction database

In short, a blockchain is a digital transaction ledger that you can think of as a spreadsheet. The blockchain contains a growing list of transactions called "blocks" that are linked together in sequence. Each block is linked to the previous block in the list. Once a block is added to the blockchain, it cannot be removed and becomes part of the permanent transaction database.

Is blockchain the ultimate distributed database?

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about blockchain is that there is no central authority or single source of truth. This means that the blockchain exists in every system connected to it. Each system has its own complete copy of the blockchain. When new blocks are added, they are received by all systems together. So, if you lose your copy of the blockchain, you can re-enter the blockchain network and get a new copy of the entire blockchain.

How to ensure transaction security?

You may be wondering, how can an open blockchain ensure the security of digital transactions? In short, it is because the blockchain uses some very complex encryption methods and crowd-sourced consensus. There is a video on YouTube that explains this principle in detail.
Blockchain is also called a "trustless system", but this does not mean that blockchain is untrustworthy. Rather, the transaction parties do not need a trusted third party to maintain the validity of the ledger and transaction, because each transaction will be verified by the distributed ledger.

Blockchain and Big Data

When you discuss blockchain in the context of Bitcoin, it seems that blockchain has nothing to do with big data. But what about outside of Bitcoin? Financial transactions, business contracts, stock transactions, all of these may involve big data issues.

Blockchain technology has already attracted the attention of the financial services industry. Citibank, Nasdaq and Visa have all made significant achievements in blockchain. Oliver Bussmann, CIO of UBS, said that blockchain technology can reduce transaction processing time from days to minutes.

The financial services industry has a huge commercial demand for blockchain technology. You can imagine the scale of blockchain in the future: a huge set of block data containing the entire history of every financial transaction. All of this data can also be used for analysis. However, blockchain only provides the integrity of the ledger, not analysis, so big data and its analysis tools are needed to intervene.

Blockchain and the Internet of Things

There is no doubt that the Internet of Things industry is in a stage of rapid development. Gartner predicts that the number of IoT devices will exceed 25 billion in the next four years. From small sensors to large household appliances, everything can be added to the Internet of Things. However, the Internet of Things will face two major challenges: device security and user data privacy.

Traditional centralized authorities and message brokers can help solve these problems, but they will not scale to handle the number of future IoT devices and the hundreds of billions of transactions these devices will generate.

Some heavyweight industry leaders have proposed that blockchain can be a solution to overcome these challenges. In the decentralized Internet of Things, blockchain will be used to facilitate transaction processing and coordination between interacting devices. Each IoT device will manage its own role, behavior, and rules in the interaction.

Following the Golden Road

Blockchain can only build one block at a time and keep growing and moving forward while keeping track of the block's location. Although the original purpose of blockchain was to support Bitcoin, like most disruptive technologies, blockchain is developing in ways and directions that are difficult to predict.

As a technologist, I find blockchain so fascinating. But after all, technology is just a tool. Our job is to ensure that this tool can be used to provide real business value. Whether it is reducing transaction processing time, analyzing transaction trends, or securing IoT information, the synergy of blockchain with big data and IoT can be our golden avenue to gain real business value.

Original article: http://www.collaborative.com/blog/big-data-iot-blockchain/
By Ed Featherston
Compiled by: Kyle
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/big-data-iot-blockchain)