Written by Ms.Florence Ip and Dr. Kyle Wong
The industrial revolution took place in 1760, which started with the invention of steam engineering and converted all manual workers into machinery workers. Computerization and the internet started the second industrial revolution from 1960, which linked people and businesses around the world together. Content creations and information sharing become the mainstream media to podcast news or advertisements to everyone throughout the internet. Now we are in a new revolution again, which is Blockchain.
Blockchain is a powerful infrastructure that can link up all kinds of digital content together to achieve comprehensive management as well as enable big data analysis. Let’s imagine all your information, including age, weight, portrait, fingerprints, residential address, financial status, medical history and expenditure history, were saved and kept under your government supercomputer since the date you were born. When you go to a public hospital, you don’t need to show your identity card or fill in any medical form. Hospitals can identify you by your portrait and fingerprint to retrieve your medical history. It will save a lot of paperwork and administration costs.
Blockchain infrastructure is a brand-new zone with a lot of space for project developments. Blockchain applicational projects have been booming in the past 5 years, which has been penetrating in medical, insurance, transportation, education, real estate, fine art and financial industries, etc. All the Blockchain development projects are innovative, creating atomic bombs to disrupt the old traditional methodology in all areas.
As mentioned above, your medical history is kept in digital form within a Blockchain to be share with your medical doctors as well as your insurance agent. When you suffer illness unfortunately and require operational treatment, your insurance agent will access your medical report from your doctor to claim your insurance. You will not be disturbed by your agent, but you will be able to obtain your claim payment much quicker than before.
How many times do you need to show your identity to prove yourself? Buying an air ticket and getting on board, you need to show your identity. When you have saved your identity information on your mobile device and airline companies have access to retrieve your information while purchasing tickets, verification can proceed behind the screen. You will not be required to provide any personal information to their system again and again.
Similarly, in the recruitment and education industries, new employers do not want to hire a person who carries a fake certificate. Top universities have issued digital credentials on Blockchain for their students to identify themselves. Students can just post their digital credentials onto their mobile devices as well as social media platforms for anyone interested to check.
Real estate and fine art are expensive in some countries, especially in Asia. However, the personal incomes of Asians are not as high as the developed countries. The property price to annual income ratios is 45 in Hong Kong, 29 in China, 24 in Taiwan and Korea, according to Numbeo.com report in 2021. A Hong Kong resident requires 45 years of annual income to purchase a home on average. An innovative real estate blockchain project, which attaches a property legal right, will be able to sell a small portion of a property to many small investors who are not able to invest in the property before. As a result, those small property investors can earn a portion of the rental income as well as capital gain without tackling any personal financial issue or property management issue. What a win-win solution to small investors!
Most importantly, Blockchain technology provides a big opportunity for all financial institutions, especially commercial banks and stock exchanges, to restructure their operational engines. Remittances and inter-banks transactions usually required heavy manual works and took at least half a day to complete. Banking staff would not know their mistakes until they were charged a penalty on the next working day. A few years ago, over 100 major banks allied together to form alliances, Ripple and Corda, to establish Blockchain technology for remittance, money transactions, letter of credit as well as security trading. Currently, major banks, including HSBC, have already offered new transactional tools on digital devices using this innovative technology. All transactions can be settled within a second regardless of geographical location, creating large benefit to increase business efficiency, lower operating cost and eliminating unnecessary penalty for the banking industry.
Soon, we will see more and more innovative ideas for Blockchain development to restructure all kinds of businesses in all regions.
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