A Continuous Serie Of Technological Breakthroughs:

In recent history, our lifestyle has been hugely transformed through several technological breakthroughs. Not going far back, we invented the combustion engine, discovered electricity, invented the telephone, computers, microelectronics, and later on, the internet... We were in a constant phase of leveling up, gaining new tools, creating new habits, jobs, and a whole range of new possibilities.

Public Transport, London in the 1800s

Now we are observing the rise of several technologies that can upscale our potential even more. To just name a few:

• We are currently developing more reliable (loss-less) communication networks: 5G and plus.
• Treating huge amounts of small bits of data that were, until recently, ignored: Big Data.
• Connecting everything to the internet: IoT.
• Training machines to solve the unsolvable: Artificial Intelligence.
• Trusting machines to do human work: Automation and Robotics.

Robot kid figurine at Seoul, South Korea. By Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

And we have made an unimaginable breakthrough, less popularly known, and still underestimated by the masses. Yet it's the technology that will serve as a solid ground for all of our future achievements: By creating Blockchains we have just made the internet as real as the real world!

The Biggest Invention Since Electricity:

You certainly know what a Blockchain is, but do you know that the Blockchain in its potential is the second biggest invention in history after electricity?

Let's recall that era when we had no electric power. Of course, we couldn't mine any Bitcoin back then. But especially we had a shorter activity time during the day, near to zero productivity during the night, our labor was mainly manual, our records and data were exclusively physical, and if you wanted to message your beloved you had no choice but to send him/her a piece of paper!

By Liam Truong on Unsplash

The change that came with electricity and its implementations was huge. And the most important result of these implementations is, unarguably, communication and the internet. People have never been that close to each other, to information, or to services. Additionally, the internet played the role of a catalyst for scientific research by facilitating cooperation and exchange, thus accelerating our evolution.

The Internet was the best of what electricity has offered to us, and Blockchain Technology has come to make it more powerful by adding to it a set of new properties.

Before blockchains, data on the internet was subject to copying, alteration, and loss. With the new properties offered: security, immutability, distribution, consensus, and transparency, we can for the first time in history create bits of data and algorithms that are unalterable, equally accessible, transparent, and infinitely available. This level of data soundness is unprecedented.

By Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Smart Contracts Will Rule:

Cryptocurrencies, the major implementation of this new internet, are only one pertinent use case of such a high-quality storage technology. Better implementations are the services that can be derived from it with the help of Smart Contracts. While "Cryptos" are specific forms of smart contracts that are meant to represent assets and their inner functions, we can use smart contracts to implement agreements, services, proofs of ownership, voting, trigger an action, or some computational work, and much more.

As a fictional example, let's say that after an agreement with his employees, a business owner decides to reward them with some Ether for completing tasks on time. For that, a smart contract is implemented on the Ethereum blockchain and made available for a set of wallets owned by the employees, to which they should submit their task completion details. Upon submission, the smart contract will evaluate a set of conditions and reward the employee accordingly.

Now consider the following properties of this smart contract which are inherited from the Blockchain properties:

• The Inner logic used in the smart contract is visible and verifiable by anyone.
• The Smart Contract's balance, besides the spent rewards, is transparently available on Etherscan
• The business owner cannot change, delete or stop the smart contract.
• The Smart contract will always be accessible even if there is no user interface

Thus transforming a human-to-human agreement into an unstoppable automation, with no room for manipulation, stepping back, or censorship.

Through this simple example, we can see how Blockchain Technology can make the internet "real", as similar smart contract-based agreements can replace real-world paperwork and administrative or even legal procedures, with minor to null risk of data loss, unavailability, or errors. And you can probably see now how much potential this has to propel us toward new levels of advancement. Yet we haven't treated all possible use cases.

The only limit to what is possible using smart contracts is our imagination.

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