Blockchain Technology in Ecosystems

Introduction

Since the human evolution data has been of utmost importance from counting to barter system and other related activities. These data with human wisdom have meaningful information. Data in early history was inscribed on stone and then on paper with the invention of paper (Hunter, 1978). Years ago, in the ancient Mesopotamians civilization started to record quantities on tablet of clay. The tablet consists of rows and columns. Data in those fields are stored as symbolically with number of dots to indicates the quantities. Thus, making it a kind of ledger. Later in the fourteenth century a new technique has been proposed and it gave a logical relationship to the entries. In this approach has been referred as double entry system. As this system maintain two entries one as debit and other as credit. Primal intention of humans is to accumulate wealth and in the form of intangible form rather than tangible form. Birth of internet and its security protocol developed in the 1998 allowed and encouraged to carry out financial transactions online. Most of the initial transaction were business to business. The technology got popularity among the people and transaction also covered the retails segment of the commerce in many folds. Thus, electronic commerce covered all aspect of the business i.e., business to business, business to consumers, consumers to consumers, etc. This growth of the electronic commerce has certain challenges that need to be addressed. Most important among the many challenges are cybersecurity, competition and order fulfillment.

Cybersecurity is the most challenging issue that is to be addressed for all the online transaction and appropriate policy and procedure need to formulate to safeguard the interest of the parties involved in the transaction. In order to safeguard the interest of the parties involved and avoid fraud etc. (Nakamoto, 2008a) (Nakamoto & Bitcoin, 2008) An anonymous person called “Satoshi Nakamoto” introduced the concept of “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System”. This is a distributed ledger, and this new approach was referred as “Blockchain”. Core idea of the blockchain was to run over de-centralized peer-to-peer network. All the participant in the network must have agreement on the entries in the ledger. This is a public decentralized ledger not owned tool by any person, group, or government. Thus, blockchain can be simple be seen as a new way to create ledgers.

The proposed technique enables users in community to record transaction in a peer-to-peer ledger such that under normal situation alteration in the transaction cannot be done by individuals once it is published. Thus, it is a digital transaction that has been once executed, shared among all the entities participating into it. As all the events are public and the transactions are verified by all the participating entities and consensus of all the parties are mandatory for transaction the be recorded. A transaction once agreed and recorded cannot be deleted from the chain. Bitcoin is the most controversial entity since its inception as it has bypassed many governmental regulatory bodies.

Technology itself is well established and accepted by the scientific community to work without any glitch. This approach has been successfully applied to both non-financial and financial real-world problem. Current scenario of technology is all about the trustworthiness and reliability this blockchain technology has gain trust on both the areas. As an example, if Instagram post shared with the trusted participant it ensures that it does not get shared by any non-trusted participant or user. This digital era has phenomenally change/affected our life, so does security, privacy and trustworthiness are equally concern. None of the third-party resources can be fully trusted, that they cannot be hacked or compromised and thus data breach can be avoided.

Blockchain has overcome these issues by invoking the concept of distributed consensus along with the anonymity. The technology has all the historical repository of transaction, and these can be verified at any point in time when required. This can be achieved without violating or concerning the issues of privacy of the parties involved.

The blockchain technology has overcome many governmental regulations and challenges. Section II of the paper focuses on Blockchain technology, in section III discuss the penetration of blockchain the existing market. Section IV discuss the application of technology in financial and non-financial sectors and section V shows data about the trends and user growth in adapting the technology followed by conclusion in section VI.