In the diamond industry, around 1 million precious stones are being digitized to prevent fraud each diamond will have a unique fingerprint identifying its origin and tracing its history from the mine it came from to the jeweler's shop window all made possible by blockchain technology. The blockchain is a new way to store and record transactions it's very much like a traditional database but the blocks are linked together cryptographically in order to make sure that they're tamper proof blockchain technology was invented in 2008 to create a digital currency
. The primary example that people are familiar with is probably Bitcoin people are using it as digital cash but actually people are started to use it more and more for things like their last will and testament or to declare that a diamond isn't a Blood Diamond or even for sharing data each block in a blockchain is computer code containing some form of information such as a contract certificate of ownership a statement forthe anticip roof of a bank's financial transaction but each block of information in this computer database
is securely connected or chained to the
other through a digital signature if you're trying to send money to relatives it can take 3-5 sometimes more days to move the money and that's because we have to be very certain about where's the money gone to before technology didn't allow us to do that quickly and cheaply with this technology will be faster and cheaper and it would be more secure because the bank has to digitally sign it and would have an audit trail of every transaction that's ever happened as new information is added the length and complexity of the blockchain increases and the computer database gets bigger with more and more people a part of it but
if someone makes an unauthorized change everyone else in the chain can see where it happened and agree whether the change is or not for example you and I could decides that I was going to buy your house for a thousand pounds and instead of hiring a lawyer
we could actually decide together that we would register that onto the blockchain so we would record a contract onto the blockchain that would indicate I have agreed at a thousand pounds on today that I would buy your house it would give you a public ledger that would be transparent and anyone could see that I had agreed to pay this I couldn't go back at a later date and change it to be five hundred pounds and we could also do things like transfer the ownership through the title deeds and those kinds of things and that would all be publicly registered in the blockchain a distributed ledger is something allows us to produce a tamper-proof record of transactions on to a public ledger it's very very similar to how an accounting ledger works but actually the idea behind a distributed ledge
r is we get rid of the middleman we can use distributed ledger technology to help fishermen for example in Scotland to prove the provenance of a piece of salmon we could say that it was definitely farmed on this time from this lake and in this particular fashion and that could all be recorded transparently onto a distributed ledger which anyone would be able to track everyone can have an identical copy of a distributed ledger and this database of assets is shared across multiple sites while nothing is invulnerable to cyberattack hacking
it is extremely difficult if you had a distributed ledger with a thousand computers on it and you had stored a contract into that ledger you and someone wanted to come in and hack and change some of the information on that in order to do that they couldn't just hack your computer they would have to hack every single other person's computer at the same time and changed exactly the same piece of information the technology could also help small-scale farmers for example by registering the availability of their produce on a block it could allow them to create economies of scale and guarantee a supply chain to large-scale customers within government there are a number of potential applications for distributed Ledger's that could revolutionize the way it works and a delivery of public services I believe this technology will have a foundational impact on the way our society runs the way our government runs the way that we interact with one another in not just economic transactions but on a day to day basis I think blockchain technology is at least as significant as the development of the Internet if the internet brought is near-instant digital communications then the blockchain brings us near instant digital asset transfer asset movement and security of data movement that's really really important to everything in financial services anything with property or anything with ownership which is massive for the economy you.