The winner of the BitIRA U Scholarship for Fall 2019 has been announced. We do have an honorable mention for the contest. Harsha Somisetty, a Computer Science major from Rutgers Business School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, wrote an essay about what the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain will look like in the next 20 years. Below is the essay that Harsha submitted:
It’s sobering to think that, despite all of humanity’s progress, it still takes 1-3 business days to transfer money to a different bank account. Fortunately, cryptocurrency and blockchain address these underlying issues with centralized systems—they’ve made it possible to shift control from inefficient institutions to the general public. And by extrapolating blockchain’s advantages—security and accessibility—we can make predictions of what an exponentially-growing, technologically-driven future could look like.
The most obvious implementation of cryptocurrency is in government, an institution with high demands and equally high levels of inefficiencies. These inefficiencies are due to the sheer magnitude of data that needs to be processed—but with blockchain, most of these unnecessary problems can be solved. Through its affinity for information transparency, more significant projects like simplifying census gathering, optimizing document processing, decentralizing medical records, can become a reality. The possibilities are endless and will only continue to evolve with our needs.
Next, let’s consider private transportation, an industry moving towards an inevitable self-driving future. But what’s more interesting are the innovations possible after this stage of automation has been breached—from vehicle sharing to inter-car communication, devising ways to manage the imminent mountains of data will be crucial to keep up with these innovations. A possible solution to streamlining said transportation demands could be creating a blockchain where vehicles can add and view information like car speed, trajectory, and destination. In fact, by using this system, the whole concept of traffic could theoretically be eliminated by allowing traffic lights to communicate with cars and optimize wait times. Blockchain alone would be paramount to this process because of the inherent requirements for speed and security—communications that aren’t instantaneous and secure would render the system useless due to the evident safety issues.
As such, blending blockchain with other developments will allow us to best exploit the best of it’s potential. New technologies like 5G will likely form symbiotic relationships with blockchain—as the former addresses the latter’s speed and data capacity problems, the latter improves the former’s security issues. Once we reach this stage, the possibilities will be unimaginable—the only challenge we still have left is to reach that level of technological mastery.
Note: Note: For more information on blockchain and cryptocurrency, visit BitIRA U. BitIRA U is a wonderful resource for information pertaining to the many aspects of crypto from regulation to security to societal issues.
