i3 - November/December 2018 - 17

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epending upon whom you ask, blockchain is either the next big thing in tech
or is just more of the dross drummed
up by the never-ending tech hype
cycle. Like many things in the world of
tech, the reality likely will fall somewhere in
between those two extreme ends of the spectrum. As a broad technological concept, blockchain has the potential to reduce inefficiencies in
certain economic processes, disseminate information in a more democratized way and help
mitigate unfairness or conflicts of interest when
different parties' incentives may not be aligned.

HOW DOES
BLOCKCHAIN WORK?

Shana Novak/Getty Images

At its most basic, blockchain is a
distributed database whose transactional data is stored sequentially in
a way that cannot be edited, deleted
or re-ordered without a consensus of other parties who are
also maintaining the
same transactional database. Those counterparties can be friend, foe, neither
or both. Data stored in the blockchain is hashed - encrypted in
a way that values or info
stored in the blockchain can be verified
without being readable by non-parties to
a transaction.

Unlike encryption/decryption, data that is
properly hashed cannot be unhashed, greatly
bolstering its security and usefulness for this
type of application. Using hashing in this way, a
doctor's office, for example, could verify your
Social Security number by having the patient
give them the hashed value of their number
which the doctor's office could compare against
the hashed value stored in the blockchain.
Similarly, the blockchain can store images, video
clips, code or anything that can be stored digitally - all securely hashed.

REDUCING INEFFICIENCY
WITH BLOCKCHAIN

As startups around the world have proven,
there are plenty of antiquated business models
out there that are ripe for disruption by someone who is willing to rethink a process, become
more customer-centric, or anger more established players.
One industry ripe for this disruption is the
shipping industry. The increasingly globalized
nature of commerce means that transoceanic
shipping is as important as ever for the free
flow of goods around the world.
Perhaps emblematic of that importance,
long-haul shipment of goods often come with
hundreds of pages of paperwork to help it pass
through the hands of the various ports, dock
workers, insurers, transport companies and
governments it interacts with on the way to its
destination. At best, shippers use a 60-yearold system called electronic data interchange
(EDI), whose best days are well behind it.
Delays in certain key pieces of paperwork and
transmittal of data can delay a shipment for
hours, days or even weeks.
Some heavy hitters within the shipping and
tech industry are setting out to change that.
IBM and Danish shipping titan Maersk teamed up
on a new project called TradeLens that uses the
power of blockchain to help goods move faster and
more efficiently around the world. Projects like
TradeLens seek to streamline shipping by, for

i3 - November/December 2018

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