Blockchain: The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World

Blockchain isn't a household buzzword, like the cloud or the Internet of Things. It's not an in-your-face innovation you can see and touch as easily as a smartphone or a package from Amazon. But when it comes to our digital lives—every digital transaction; exchange of value, goods and services; or private data —blockchain is the answer to a question we've been asking since the dawn of the internet age: How can we collectively trust what happens online?
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Blockchain: The Invisible Technology That's Changing the World
BY ROB MARVIN
FEBRUARY 6, 2017 2 COMMENTS
Large swaths of your digital life will soon run atop a blockchain foundation just beneath the surface, and you may not even realize it.
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Blockchain feature
This feature originally appeared as the cover story in the February 2017 issue of the PCMag Digital Edition.

Blockchain isn't a household buzzword, like the cloud or the Internet of Things. It's not an in-your-face innovation you can see and touch as easily as a smartphone or a package from Amazon. But when it comes to our digital lives—every digital transaction; exchange of value, goods and services; or private data —blockchain is the answer to a question we've been asking since the dawn of the internet age: How can we collectively trust what happens online?

Every year we run more of our lives—more core functions of our governments, economies, and societies—on the internet. We do our banking online. We shop online. We log into apps and services that make up our digital selves and send information back and forth. Think of blockchain as a historical fabric underneath recording everything that happens exactly as it occurs. Then the chain stitches that data into encrypted blocks that can never be modified and scatters the pieces across a worldwide network.