Distributed platform: The dawn of a revolution?

Jan 30, 2014

Sogeti Labs

In my recent post about BitCoin, I mostly focused on the BitCoin currency itself. But there is more to BitCoin than the currency itself. The transactions that take place when people use BitCoin are registered on a very special platform. It is a distributed platform where basically anyone can become part of the network. “Wait! But how can that even be secure?!”, I hear you ask. Well, it works by using strong encryption algorithms that link every transaction to earlier and later transactions that have been registered, and it uses the distributed network to verify that every node is behaving as it should, each verifying the actions of others.  Once a transaction is registered into this series of encrypted transactions, it becomes practically impossible to manipulate the record of the transaction: you would have to re-encrypt all transactions that have taken place since!

But now for the real game-changer: this platform can be used for ANY kind of transaction, not just the ones about Bitcoins! If you wanted to register marriages between people, you could use this platform to track who is married to whom. If you want to register ownership of a house, you could use the Bitcoin platform to register this, and any transactions where the house changes ownership. In effect, the Bitcoin platform has become the first distributed, people-owned registry authority.  So, if you happen to be a bank, notary, patent-agency or government this – or a similar – platform may very well mean the end of your monopoly on trust. Instead of trusting the authority of some entity based on its history or title, we would trust the encryption mechanisms and the design of the network to be able to tell us ‘what really happened’ and ‘what is really the status’ of something of value. I don’t think this will happen overnight, but one thing is certain: this new model is now out there ‘in the wild’, ready for anyone to pick up and run with. Revolution, anyone?

More about this topic in an article by colleague SogetiLabs fellow Sander Duivestein at http://vint.sogeti.com/23172/

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Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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