How is your perspective of blockchain evolving?
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When blockchain first came out, all the big financial folks set up these little skunkworks teams to produce as many blockchain applications as they could think of. Most of those withered and died on the vine, but those groups were the cool place to be for as long as two years. And everybody did it because it was as if you couldn't not do blockchain if your competitors were. But I'm not sure that it led to a lot of fruitful or commercially viable business applications.
I didn't quite get blockchain in the beginning. And as for the cryptocurrency aspect, I still don't trust or understand that. But I do understand it now in the context of a smart contract because that makes total sense to me. I've been doing a lot of research on things like the Flux Network and the Helium Network where you're crowdsourcing people. That would enable us to spin up an IoT network without having to buy SIM cards from Verizon for every vending machine we have out there, which would be completely infeasible from a cost perspective. It makes sense to me that there's a trusted network where people can get paid to do social tasks with some compliance on it.
We looked at implementing our own blockchain at one point. We do hearing aids, so we wanted to protect the identity of the medical device and all the data it generated, from when it was created until it was surgically implanted in someone's head. We wanted to have absolute security that no one could mess with that tracking. I've seen the same thing done with shipping containers. If you ship something across the world that's in a freezer container and you want to make sure that container doesn't get under X percent humidity, then you can protect it with an algorithm in a shared ledger that everyone trusts, i.e., blockchain.
I still can't say that I have a good use case for blockchain. The vendors that talk about it say, "What about credentialing transcripts?" And I think that that's fair, but I don't know that I need blockchain to do that.
To me, the appealing thing about blockchain is the amenable public aspect because people have been doing contracts forever, but the problem is that the providence is hidden. Being in higher education, it's all about credentials, transcripts, etc., for us. Using blockchain is a potential solution but I'm not sure what the need is.