Let’s Meet Blockchain

Technology Changing for Working, Creating, and Playing

Sylvain Metz

Revamping the erstwhile technology is a key to progress ahead. It is a cyclical overhauling of the industrial pathway. Blockchain is an upcoming model to address the internet pathway that is poles apart from what currently is. Expectations are evolving day by day and so is the search for a befitting reply. And this fitting rejoinder is the behemoth of blockchain. The book’s cover design itself says it all. A blockchain user avails an exclusive mutual coupling with his service provider without anyone else to organize this coupling. This exclusive mutual coupling ensures data safety and data privacy for a ‘new paradigm’ and no pipe dream.

Blockchain is becoming an all-weather pop-up despite contrarians hedging it. A lot of mistrust prevails over the authenticity of cryptocurrency and NFT bugging the minds of common people. This book is a myth buster to ward off morbid fears clogging the populace to call it a ‘great disruptor’. The profound scientific approach behind evolving this technique needs its due felicitation.  The author admits the prevailing widespread distrust but yet ‘a large group of computer scientists, programmers, engineers, etc are gung-ho over creating ‘the next generation of internet experience’.

Governments and corporations worldwide are implementing blockchain technology and by 2024, they have already invested over 19 billion USD. ‘Globally the blockchain market was worth US $4.8 billion in 2021 which grew to US $ 11.7 billion in 2022. By 2030, that figure is expected to reach US $ 69 billion. Thus Sylvain vouches for, ‘Blockchain technology has already filtered into your life.’ This book serves as a primer on the blockchain ecosystem though not endorsing the technology but deliberates on the viability of this technology. The author has let the readers decide the veracity of adopting the blockchain ecosystem. The book presents the prevailing scenario along with past experiences from various sectors and situations to decide the future course of action. There are several cases of survey records for readers to get a firm opinion of the situation. Sylvain has also rummaged through tomes of white papers, research papers, etc as his resource material is painstakingly provided on each page and at the end of the book.

Sylvain Metz has provided several illustrations to explicate technical concepts. The blocks in the encrypted chain are stored on a network of decentralized computers as a chain and are unalterable. ‘One of the key tenets of blockchain is privacy’. Each block includes the hash of the previous and new validators, linking them sequentially. Sylvain cracks his witty charm to explain this working of hashcash. 

Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit (SHA-256) is an open-source encryption program created by the U.S. National Security Agency, used to mine (create) bitcoin. Sylvain uses it to convert Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 -  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” into a 64-character hash to represent the entire sonnet. Just imagine - ‘You could download the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress and will get a 64-character string that represents its contents.’

The book tends to analyze human minds and societal trends from different perspectives down the ages and thus extrapolate the upcoming trends as well. Sylvain Metz adopts a reader-friendly narration to make the world denizens feel the imperative need to know the nitty-gritty of this futuristic technology. The book is laid into four sections: blockchain, cryptocurrency, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and Web 3.0.

The already pervasive blockchain has far-reaching consequences – be it the health sector, financial institutions, real estate, print media, the practice of law, travels, entertainment sector, banks and financial institutions, and even the government domain.‘The Plethora of services – land and health records, vacation booking, etc is gaining a digital imprint giving up the erstwhile rigmarole of a slew of protracted document identifications. Private banking is becoming a reality where it never existed. 

Our medical information is shared on numerous apps connected to wearable monitors. The author being an astute one-time journalist has a valid precaution – ‘..if that information found its way to your health insurance company, it could be used against you.’  Here blockchain can make a difference by keeping medical records encrypted. Sylvain cites the case of the Baltic nation Estonia where the blockchain program was launched extensively in 2016 to encrypt the medical records of 1.3 million residents and is used for over 1000 government portals. ‘The records are timestamped and cannot be altered.’ The book enlists several medical institutions around the globe including London-based Medichain uses a blockchain platform and New York City-based Embleema, a HIPPA-compliant medical blockchain allowing due compensation to patients. The nodal agency for American public health – Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) joined hands with IBM to build a blockchain-based system way back in 2017. Medical fraud in Medicare and Medicaid system inflicts a huge loss to the national economy because – ‘people manipulate or destroy data’. Blockchain is here to stem the rot.  

The book discusses several governmental and international regulations along with major market violations and scams. The loopholes in the existing system are analyzed with great emphasis so that readers can decide ‘Do I need this?’ 

The author calls a spade a spade. ‘In some cases, cryptocurrencies just fail…The cryptocurrency market is not snow-white.’ In a report issued in May 2021, the FTC reported that between October 2020 and March 2021, consumers lost more than U.S.$80 million to cryptocurrency investment scams. Cryptocurrency can be lost without a recovery tool in a custodial wallet or hard drive. It was reported that in the first five months of 2022 alone, 2,421 cryptocurrencies failed.

The author lampoons the lawmakers saying – ‘the U.S. Congress is struggling to understand the market. Remember, these lawmakers still don’t understand the Internet well enough to reign it in. Now, they are trying to wrap their heads around the idea of equating pieces of virtual data with cash.’ In September 2022, the Biden-Harris administration released its first-ever framework to find ways to regulate cryptocurrency.  However several state legislatures have gone ahead and have adopted regulations. The UK Government is looking for ways to reign in a market that is gaining maturity. The European Parliament took its first steps to regulate cryptocurrency assets in March 2022. European Commission has introduced a series of proposals.

The EU brought in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016. In May 2023, the EU fined Facebook’s parent company, Meta, $1.3 billion, and again in September 2023, TikTok was fined 345 million euros.

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, represent unique digital or physical assets. They can represent a piece of art, a dinner for two, or even a house. NFTs could open the world of publishing for independent writers and poets who can use this medium to sell their work directly to the public, bypassing traditional publishing methods.

NFT mortgages are a paradigm shifter. As digital assets, they are easier to trade on the Internet. Believe it or not, NFT sales reached U.S.$25 billion in 2021 compared to just U.S.$95 million in 2020. NFT sales went from U.S.$95 million to U.S.$25 billion in just one year.

The veracity of blockchain gets instilled all the more since it was the U.S. National Security Agency, a highly reliable agency that created the open-source encryption program called Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit (SHA-256) that is used to mine (create) bitcoin. The book cites something so convincing to ward off fears ‘music legend Bob Dylan, his son Jesse Dylan, and two others have created a platform where leading artists, publishers, and brands can convert their work into NFTS. 

There’s an upheaval raging in our computer ecosystem. Blockchain offers a different visor to see things differently employing a different approach altogether. Even the web browser is different which makes blockchain a different planet of Web3.0. Should we go for this extraterrestrial settlement? 

Paper length: 399 pages

Business Expert Press; New York