Revisiting Blockchain Possibilities

After a brief pause I am back to good posting here at CoinFinance (and at Digital Ventures which has been my mirror publication Blog and where I do my revising and editing work). I would like to begin this week with revisiting the business possibilities that may hold forth for the growing universe of Digital Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Altcoin and Litecoin, etc....

It has been noticed that the price of Bitcoin is going through a difficult period of sustaining a plateau level. There some pessimistic prognostications about where it might go from here. Certainly if the price maintains the current downward path that will not be good for the future of the businesses already established globally, even if the techniques for protecting and edge price fluctuations is set in place. In the long run no one will be investing or back businesses dependent on worthless fundamentals. This is truism of good investment advice.

But anyway there is parts of the business and investing community still placing an optimistic outlook to Bitcoin businesses and all the possibilities surrounding it. Let us not forget that beyond the money or currency like properties of Bitcoin, it is also a technological infrastructure and as such, its development will be less affected by the whims and volatile beliefs of Mr. Market. With this said I will bring here today a glance at some of the possible Business models and sectors, existing and emergent that might utilise the cryptocurrency technology and infrastructure as a way to leveraging and grow its profit margins or feasibility going into the future.

The inspiration came from this post on Coindesk, which I think it is very much worth to share and refer to. A nice post describing 6 possible future developments for businesses focusing on Bitcoin and its technology. The first one is on record-keeping. In our age of massive Data being generated and circulating globally with a big chunk of it on-line on the Internet and the Cloud, the blockchain technology might provide a very good way to enhance the security and scalability of the deployment and record/storage for that Big Data. This may enable the emergence of a public cryptographic ledger:

Bitcoin’s public ledger has the ability to enable trusted record-keeping on the Internet while increasing overall transparency. There hasn’t been a really good way to offer a public database of information prior to this type of cryptographic ledger.

Some interesting projects have already appeared that seek to record public information with block chain technologies. One example is Monegraph, spearheaded by a New York University (NYU) professor to record digital art ownership on the namecoin block chain.

Business cases for an Internet-enabled public record are already percolating as well.(1)

The next model that caught my attention is Asset Distribution. Indeed in our age the opportunity is big for us today to bypass on a terrific way the bureaucratic obstacles in the way of asset distribution and also to raise resources and Capital without the sometimes prohibitive costs of Bankers fees There are some regulatory hurdles to overcome but once that is achieved the possibility is there doubtless:

These projects may soon face their own regulatory issues, as evidenced by recent rumors about the potential for such assets to be viewed as securities, but there are some interesting technical ideas that seek to make cryptographic asset distribution a viable business.

Cryptographic asset distribution may allow companies to raise money in a secure and effective manner without relying on bankers who charge massive fees.(2)

The last possibility that I would like to mention on this post is related to Smart Contracts. This more advanced possibility will most probably strike a chord in the Fund Management industry. For decades those industries were struggling with issues in Counter-party legal enforcement of contracts. With blockchain this enforcement could be made digitally and.... in a smart and compliantly cheap way. The full range of possibilities aren't yet clear here but the potential is definitely there:

The concept of smart contracts was first conceived by researcher Nick Szabo in the 1990s. The idea is to implement programmable, self-executing agreements without the need for a third party.

The true application of smart contacts hasn’t been fully realized yet, but bitcoin’s emergence is generating momentum for this type of digital agreement between parties.

One company, Hedgy, is working to build smart contracts in the bitcoin block chain in order to enforce contractual price agreements. Hedgy’s goal with smart contracts like this is to reduce the risk of bitcoin price volatility.(3)

I only touched on three of the 6 suggestions made on the referred post. But I think I gave my own perspective on these three and with that made my contribution to elucidate and educate as much as is currently in my radius of influence about the potential for the technology and infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to be of real value to Businesses, Investment advisers or the public at large and for this to gain further and further momentum into the future.

(1), (2) and (3) 6 Types of Businesses Bitcoin will enable....