Introduction to Blockchains & What It Means to Big Data
Perhaps most significant development in IT over the past few years, blockchain has the potential to change the way that the world approaches big data, with enhanced security and data quality.
“Arguably the most significant development in information technology over the past few years, blockchain has the potential to change the way that the world approaches big data, with enhanced security and data quality just two of the benefits afforded to businesses using Satoshi Nakamoto’s landmark technology.” Blockchain is a distributed database system that acts as an “open ledger” to store and manage transactions. Each record in the database is called a block and contains details such as the transaction timestamp as well as a link to the previous block. This makes it impossible for anyone to alter information about the records retrospectively. Also, due to the fact that the same transaction is recorded over multiple, distributed database systems, the technology is secure by design. With the above in mind, blockchain is immutable – information remains in the same state for as long as the network exists.
When you talk about blockchain in the context of Bitcoin, the connection to Big Data seems a little tenuous. What if, instead of Bitcoin, the blockchain was a ledger for other financial transactions? Or business contracts? Or stock trades? The financial services industry is starting to take a serious look at block chain technology. Oliver Bussmann, CIO of UBS says that blockchain technology could “pare transaction processing time from days to minutes.” The business imperative in financial services for blockchain is powerful. Imagine blockchains of that magnitude. Huge data lakes of blocks that contain the full history of every financial transaction, all available for analysis. Blockchain provides for the integrity of the ledger, but not for the analysis. That’s where Big Data and accompanying analysis tools will come into play.
Recently, a consortium of 47 Japanese banks signed up with a blockchain startup called Ripple to facilitate money transfers between bank accounts using blockchain. The main reason behind the move is to perform real-time transfers at a significantly low cost. One of the reasons traditional real-time transfers were expensive was because of the potential risk factors. Double-spending (which is a form of transaction failure where the same security token gets used twice) is a real problem with real-time transfers. With blockchains, that risk is largely avoided. Big data analytics makes it possible to identify patterns in consumer spending and identify risky transactions a lot quicker than they can be done currently. This reduces the cost with real-time transactions.
In Industries outside of banking too, the main drive for adoption of Blockchain technologies has been security. Across healthcare, retail and public administration, establishments have started experimenting with blockchain to handle data to prevent hacking and data leaks. In healthcare, a technology such as blockchain can make sure that multiple “signatures” are sought at every level of data access. This can help prevent a repeat of events such as the 2015 attack that led to the theft of over 100 million patient records.
Up until now, real-time fraud detection has only been a pipe dream and banking institutions have always relied on using technologies to identify fraudulent transactions retrospectively. Since the blockchain has a database record for every single transaction, it provides a way for institutions to mine for patterns in real-time, if need be.
But all of these possibilities also raise questions about privacy and this is in direct contradiction to the reason why blockchain and bitcoins became popular in the first place.
