What is blockchain?

I have been working as a marketing professional for the last 16 years. I spent all of those years in the hospitality industry. When life changed due to COVID, I asked myself what my passion was. It’s frustrating not to know what makes you wake up in the morning with excitement.

Until…I stumbled upon blockchain technology. I have always liked technology, but this one is different. I got into the current Web2.0 a bit late. That’s why I got excited to find that blockchain could be a foundation of Web3.0 that could change everything.

The biggest challenge is that I am not a developer. How can I get involved with this exciting technology? As a business strategist and a marketer, I discovered early on that one of the significant issues of blockchain is user adoption. And the reason is that many people perceive blockchain technology as too complicated. Many even view it as a scam.

So, this is where I see an opportunity. I could use my non-technical skills in strategy and marketing to drive user adoption for blockchain. And how can I do that? I plan to make the technology easy to understand. It’s a (big) challenge I put on myself. I have to learn the technology, digest it, and somehow entice people to know about it. At the end of the day, the role of strategy is to identify challenges to find ways to overcome them. And, the role of marketing is to create demand. Theoretically, it should be a perfect formula.

Before I finish this post, let me answer the above question. What is blockchain? The oversimplified answer is that it is another way to store data. You can think of blockchains as distributed databases that a group of individuals controls and that store and share information. We are all familiar with applications like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Those applications are owned by companies that store all of the user data in their centralised databases. Blockchain does the same function (storing data) but in a decentralised way. It means data is stored in a network of computers (nodes). The keyword is decentralisation.

Another question people ask a lot is whether blockchain is the same as cryptocurrency. And the answer is yes and no. Cryptocurrency is one of many use cases of blockchain technology. Crypto does play a crucial role in blockchain’s user adoption.

Enough for an intro for today. I will share what I learn in the next post.

Thanks. Apivut