According to the Silvio Micali, who is a Ford Professor of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the blockchain technology can help the world to evolve into a borderless economy. Micali emphasized that to realize the true potential of the blockchain, the technology has to scale up and need to be adopted by a wide range of customers around the globe.
Focus areas for Blockchain
The professor was talking in the Daybreak Asia News program of Bloomberg and stressed that for having a true, global economy, the blockchain technology has to focus on three critical functional areas simultaneously. Micali noted that most of the organizations in the financial technology and banking industry had utilized the technical prowess of blockchain although he finds the high level of security provided by blockchain is the true innovation of the technology. Such level of security, Micali noted, was not available in the previously used decentralized system.
The three functions professor stressed for wide adoption of blockchain technology include decentralization, scalability, and security. Once all of these three functions are incorporated in the blockchain, the technology can transform the centralized position of the current economy to a truly global and borderless state. Micali has the belief that blockchain and cryptocurrency can fulfill these three functions simultaneously although so far the technology has been able to include only two functions at a time – decentralization and security. The third function of scalability has yet to be fully incorporated, and developers need to work hard on the scaling issues before the blockchain technology becomes part of the mainstream and gets widely adopted by the customers.
Epic rise and fall of Cryptocurrencies
The epic rise of cryptocurrencies came to an end in January 2018, and the usability of some of the coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP came crashing to the ground. Bitcoin, the number one cryptocurrency by market capitalization, suffered from the systemic efficiencies like high transaction fees and long confirmation times despite using the blockchain technology for secure and decentralized transaction systems. Later on, some innovations like lightning network came to Bitcoin’s rescue to help improve its network issues, but the hurdle of scalability continues to plague its fortunes.
Safety aspects of Blockchain
Heaping praise on the cryptocurrency and blockchain for providing enhanced transactional safety, Micali criticized the centralized transaction systems for their security lapses and being more vulnerable to the hackers, privacy breaches, and online thefts. The professor noted that it is practically impossible for the hackers to breach a decentralized network system of blockchain technology. The blockchain brings to us the level of security we deserve without worrying about any data and security breach. When asked about a specific time frame by which he expects the world to become a borderless economy, MIT professor refrained from giving an exact time table. However, he noted that the economies based on blockchain technology would attract more global partners and emerge as a more inclusive alternative to the current system of centralized hubs dominated by a few players from the banking and technology industries.
The key to a sustainable crypto and blockchain future is to overcome the problem of scalability. To increase the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain, the technology has to provide scalable solutions to the industries and individual customers. We have already started witnessing the attempts to address scalability issues with the global business giants like International Business Machine (IBM), Facebook, Amazon, and City Bank working hard to come up with their take on the blockchain technology. It seems that the dream of a true, global, borderless economy is not very far from its realization.
