There's a point in the evolution of every useful technology when geek speak starts reaching out to the wider community, and normal folks (like you and me) start paying attention. You might remember 1994, when people started talking about the web. All the tech stuff about protocols and clients receded into the background as we latched on to the idea of a great big collection of connected content anyone could browse with a mouse. And business ideas bloomed.
I felt a similar moment dawning when I read Scott Rosenberg's piece on blockchain – the “hopelessly geeky new technology” that's got venture capitalists excited. Rosenberg's article is an easy-to-digest A to Z of this topic, explaining blockchain in simple terms, discussing the uses it can be put to, and entertaining us along the way.
My take is that blockchain could be very good news for business, not least the insurance industry. Why? Well, blockchain is a kind of built-in ledger or audit trail embedded in digital transactions. It's a core part of Bitcoin, but clearly the uses go far beyond digital currencies.
Imagine that every piece of information you exchange has a guaranteed, verified life history woven into its very DNA. Every recipient of that information would know where it's been, who's handled it. So the provenance and credibility of data would become easily verifiable. We'd be able to take decisions safe in the knowledge that we had trustworthy information.
Now, think about underwriting. Underwriters put their names to a risk. (The Latin for “underwrite” is “subscribe”.) Using blockchain, a digital risk object could contain its underwriters.
So far, this is just a matter of storing data differently. But using blockchains in this way is a massive business disruptor. If digital business objects are verified, self-auditing and self-describing, while encapsulating all their related objects, then who needs a hub? Who needs a marketplace when the market is distributed?
This isn't going to happen overnight. But it's a compelling vision. You could also see it as the ultimate triumph of data standards: An everyone-to-everyone digital business platform built entirely on transparent, community-owned standardized data.
Read Scott Rosenberg's feature on Backchannel. There's plenty more food for thought in there.
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