Ethereum in industry applications - Ethereum Tutorial

- There are many more industries in which Ethereum can be a good fit and solve some of the problems. Healthcare is one. We hear a lot about the electronic health record or the EHR and how it's being shared among many different organizations and practitioners. These EHRs are stored in lots of different places. Wouldn't it be cool if we could create one blockchain where our EHR lived? And it lived in one place, and then, we had all the people, that needed to get to it, be able to go into one place, and we wouldn't have to share it. We get all the advantages of transparency. We have the advantage of resilience. And it's a lot easier than going to one, or going to one portal than it would be going to many different portals and logging in and seeing pieces of our health record. Of course, the problem with that is transparency, right? Transparency is good. Transparency is bad. We don't want all of our information to be published to the public blockchain. So, we can kind of straddle the fence a little bit. We actually can put our data on a blockchain, but what if we encrypt it first? In that way, we have the only key. What we can do at that point is we can authorize our practitioners and say, "Yep, here's my key. In that way, you can go see all my data, but no one else can." So, that's one way to handle it. There are other approaches where there's layered encryption or types of encryption called attribute-based encryption, lots of research going on in that area. But be aware that blockchain is being looked at very closely for things such as scoped or maybe even global electronic health records, treatment records, medical history, all kinds of information can be stored. And the centralized version of that one record makes it very appealing. Because, again, remember we have the transparency. We also had the auditability, the history. So, a practitioner could see all of your medical history in one place. Energy markets, another place that are looking or another industry that's looking at blockchain technology and Ethereum in particular. They're looking at abilities to interact with public data repositories, such as usage tracking. Right now, there are some energy utilities that do collect usage data. But, typically, they store it and they have a small data set, or they have their own public, or rather private data set, where they store the data. And it's not being shared a whole lot. There are some consortium's that do share data, but there's not an easy place where different energy providers or suppliers can go and look at large-scale usage information. Well, blockchain can solve that. If all energy usage or a large portion of it were put on a blockchain, they would be able to go through, and analyze that data, and, potentially, find areas in which energy costs could be lowered, and energy efficiency could be increased. Production procurement, another spinoff of that. For example, assuming that we had a single blockchain of most energy usage, then, energy providers could determine where they would need to send their energy, and the destination would be more intelligent. Less energy will be wasted because you wouldn't have to produce as much and send it to places that may or may not be using it. So, lots of different opportunities in the energy space. One of the most commonly referenced industrial applications of blockchain technology is the supply chain. A supply chain is, basically, the mechanism or the processes of tracking and tracing and controlling a product or service from the producer all the way to the consumer. And it gives us a bi-directional tracking mechanism. So, you can track your product to find out when they actually get purchased. You can also purchase a product and trace it all the way back to its point of origin. One concrete example comes from the Oracle Blockchain group. They devised a blockchain application for the supply chain of a premium olive oil producer. So, the premium olive oil producer is in Italy. They take the best olives. They create a very high-quality product, and they ship it to people who are willing to pay a premium for a very high-quality product. However, how do you know if you're spending a lot of money on a bottle of olive oil, that it really is what it says it is? Well, that's where blockchain comes into play. Because what you can do is take a bottle, one of these bottles of olive oil, and with your smartphone app, you can scan it and it provides the provenance trace. In other words, shows you all the way back to the point of origin, actually, where the olives were picked, and when they were picked, and when they were pressed. So, it gives you lots of information. That information is very valuable. Because of the amount of information the blockchain stores, the producer can charge a premium price because they've increased the confidence that the product in your hand actually has very high quality. And you can always trace. Even if it's not high-quality olive oil, you can trace a blockchain product all the way back to who produced it and when it was. Now, I'm sure you've noticed that I've talked about smart contracts. It's one of the big things that Ethereum introduced. But we really haven't talked about what they are. Don't worry, we're going to get there. But for now, just to understand that smart contracts are, let's say, little pieces of code or little programs, that Ethereum runs for you and make sure that it runs every time. It basically makes Ethereum automatic.