Innovative technologies are implemented into our daily lives on a regular basis and their evolution processes are constantly accelerating. Just think about the speedy growth process that the mobile phone industry went through. A few years ago, they were merely being used to make phone calls or send a text, and look at us now; they have transformed to ‘smartphones’ that seem to be attached to our hands. Every spare moment is being utilized to catch up on taking snapshots, reading news items, interacting on social media, checking our email or playing a game. Similar to the mobile phone industry, look at the internet, the monetary system, artificial intelligence and the evolution they went through.
Technology is making great advancements, for instance the implementation and developments in augmented reality (AR), robotics, FinTech and blockchain technology, that have been the topic of many media news stories.
What does the future looks like?
With all these developments what can we expect in the future? Well you might be surprised to know some of the things developers and companies are currently working on.
Houses will be built with the help of a 3D-printer, just take a look at this first commercial housing project built with 3D-concrete printing technology, called Milestone. Robocops are working alongside real-life police officers in fighting crime around the world. The working environment in the future will drastically change as the majority of people work remote and on a freelance basis. Robotic telepresence and companion robots function as caretakers of elderly people and save societies a lot of money on health-care. The sharing economy has managed to become one of the worlds’ biggest industries and it has taken a real stance at reducing consumer consumption. A hyperloop system has transformed our global transportation possibilities and will take us from city-to-city in seconds.
Decentralization
A common denominator in these futuristic projects is the worldwide implementation of decentralized platforms, services and perhaps even entire nations. Blockchain is connected to decentralization because of the fact that transactions on the blockchain are verified and executed in a decentralized way, meaning no individual third party is involved in the transaction verification process.
The blockchain technology will disrupt a lot of industries. Jobs will be available on a decentralized work platform through a smart contract, with payment in major digital currencies. In a few years the television will be overtaken by streaming service providers like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime. YouTube will be outpaced by decentralized platforms like Dtube or Steemit.
We won’t be driving cars anymore, because cars are driving us in an autonomous way. We enter our route in the system and the car takes us to our destination. Uber is out, the decentralized Air Taxi is in.
Education will be offered through a decentralized entity. Two professors of renowned UK university Oxford, are creating the worlds’ first decentralized blockchain University, called Woolf University.
IBM is creating crypto-anchor chips, implemented with blockchain technology, to track the entire supply-chain process to verify its legitimacy and make sure no one tampered with the products. The chips are no bigger than a grain of salt and are cost efficient at 10 cents a piece.
Healthcare can also benefit greatly from blockchain applications and devices. Recently blockchain 4.0 project Seele has announced it will be revealing more details on its apparent groundbreaking solution to treat cerebrovascular diseases.
It’s hard to envision a future without blockchain’s distributed ledger technology. Trust is one of the most time-consuming things for businesses to acquire, because previously it needed to be reached organically and thus it could take a long time for consumers to fully trust the businesses they are dealing with. By using blockchain technology, trust can be reached instantly through the open, transparent distributed ledger infrastructure.
Comparing blockchain with the traditional financial system, there are more advantages to blockchain than there are on the traditional financial system, that’s why you see banks and other institutions slowly testing the blockchain infrastructure.
The truth is that by using blockchain technology, institutions can save a lot of money as human interference is no longer necessary. Blockchain technology is less vulnerable to hacks and transactions can be executed really fast, especially when new technologies that solve the scalability issue, like the Lightning Network and Plasma will be fully functional.
The time is come to adapt, or else you will stand a chance to be left behind. So, try to reserve some of your precious time to focus on reading up on new technologies or promising developments in innovations. Enigma is one of the projects that has caught my attention. How can Enigma help with enabling a decentralized society?
Picture credits to @MackanSz
How does Enigma fit into a fully functional, decentralized futuristic society?
While starting the project back in 2015, Enigma has been building a decentralized supercomputer on the blockchain that enables for dApps to be deployed on the network, all while users are getting rewarded in native ENG tokens for interacting with the platform. Enigma aims to create real, usable and groundbreaking solutions that solve real-world problems.
In 1996, even before Bitcoin was officially introduced by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, Nick Szabo wrote a research paper called: Smart Contracts: Building blocks for digital markets, in which he laid down the ground rules for an implementation of Smart Contracts into the technological innovation of blockchain. Smart contracts as we know them today, are an important part of blockchain infrastructure platforms.
During his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Guy Zyskind, founder and CEO of blockchain protocol project Enigma, discovered a way to improve upon existing smart contract technology by making them private. These ‘secret contracts’, as they are called, are powering the Enigma protocol.
Without the ability to send sensitive data privately through a smart contract, the use of smart contracts will be compromised. Imagine sending sensitive personal information about someone’s health, personal data, finances or lending contracts, without a build in safety mechanism that prevents malicious actors to steal that data. Enigma is solving this privacy issue head-on by implementing privacy guaranteed smart contracts, called ‘secret contracts’. To make it easier on developers to build onto the Enigma platform, the team decided to keep it completely Ethereum compliant.
The specific details of the ‘secret contracts’ will be announced in the release of DISCOVERY, that is projected to come out somewhere in the second half of 2018. After the DISCOVERY release other releases will follow that improve upon privacy, build and ultimately release its own native blockchain with the goal of being non-reliant on other solutions. After initially minting and releasing Ethereum based ERC-20 tokens, Enigma tokens will be swapped for ENG native tokens after their main net launch in 2020.
My personal beliefs
I truly believe we will succeed in creating a fully decentralized social society, somewhere in the future. Decentralization gives back the power to individuals, instead of making big companies even bigger, which allows them to have too much power and control over humanity. However, we do have some bumps in the road to decentralization that need to be addressed first in order for us to move forward. After solving the scalability and security issues, Enigma and the countless real-world solutions they can provide, will create a new ecosystem in which people take back control over their personal data, personal financial information and fundamental rights, without the interference of unreliable, untrusted, easy to be manipulated third party, centralized institutions.
What do you think? Will we see a decentralized future?
If you would like to know more about the Enigma project, you can check out their official channels:
Website: https://enigma.co/
Telegram: https://t.me/EnigmaProject
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnigmaProject/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EnigmaMPC
Full disclosure: This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my personal opinion about the future of decentralization and how the Enigma project can play a role in it. This article is written for the Enigma Community Writing Contest #WhyEnigma. The Enigma team might reward me for writing this article. I want to express that everything I write is based on my own opinion and interests and before investing you should always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
Subscribe to my channels Steemit, Medium and Twitter if you like my articles and would like to be informed about Blockchain, cryptocurrency projects and news. You can also read my articles on LinkedIn. If you have any questions about this article, please comment in the comment section below. Thank you! LindaCrypto