What Blockchain Means for the Future of Business

Arran James Stewart, Co-owner, Job.comWhen most people think of blockchain, they tend to think of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ripple. Bitcoin has the mindshare advantage of being both the originator of, as well as easily the most famous and successful application of blockchain, offering complete financial decentralization. However, all of its other properties, such as trust, security, speed, and disintermediation, are applicable to making today’s business processes more efficient. In fact, they’re nothing short of revolutionary. Let’s discuss.Time is money, as the old saying goes. But the current banking system simply wastes money.  Modern centralized banking system use wire transfers that take days to transmit from one bank to another. Payments are delayed and companies lose profits due to transaction costs, currency fluctuations, and the wide range of other barriers put up by centralized money services. If time is money, then we’re looking at an unacceptable loss. Cryptocurrencies, however, don’t have these problems; by removing the intermediaries (i.e. banks) through use of blockchain, cryptos provide more speed and security than the traditional financial services system. Businesses will be paid instantly, wasting less time (i.e. money) in the process, which is the key to growth and efficiency.But cryptocurrencies are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact blockchain can have on future business. Over the last 12 months, the list of applications for this technology has blossomed with astonishing speed, with nearly fourteen-hundred ICO companies built on the blockchain. Each company offers a different application method for blockchain technology from shared server space to earning cryptocurrency through in-game mining.Blockchain technology is versatile and provides a level of trust, efficiency and security that our current centralized systems simply cannot compete with.  In the future, everything from ordering takeout to making travel plans will be processed through blockchain. It removes middlemen from the equation, increasing the margin for the end supplier and provide a seamless service end-to -end for consumers. Technology businesses built on blockchain will become a prominent part of the small-to-medium-sized enterprises we’ll know and trust in the future.Even large software service providers -- exactly the people you’d expect -- are now looking to place blockchain at the heart of their infrastructure. Facebook, for instance, has already begun exploring the use of this technology to improve their security and stability, while Microsoft has invested heavily in its own blockchain implementation research.  Use in financial services are simply the beginning of a massive shift towards this technology platform.Put simply, there’s more to blockchain than the insane speculative gains boasted by Bitcoin. It’s the technology of the future, soon to be the basis of the business and tech world. If you want to get in on the ground floor of it, it’s best to start now. [author]About the Author: Arran James Stewart is the co-owner of blockchain recruitment platform Job.com. Relying on a decade worth of experience in the recruitment industry, Arran has consistently sought to bring recruitment to the cutting edge of technology. Arran helped develop one of the world’s first multi-post to media buy talent attraction portals, and also helped reinvent the way job content found candidates through utilizing matching technology against job aggregation. Arran is currently launching the first blockchain recruitment platform with Job.com – which aims to be the most secure, efficient, and transparent hiring process ever. As a first-mover in online recruitment technology with a decade of experience in recruitment, Arran’s expertise has been featured in Forbes, Reuters, CoinJournal, and HRTechnologist, among other publications. [/author]