The potential of blockchain

With great power comes great accountancy

All these factors provide blockchain technology with great potential that is yet to be realised:

Visibility and transparency:
The distributed ledger database maintains records in ‘blocks’ that can be seen by all blockchain systems’ users in near real time.

Security:
Supported by cryptography and digital signatures — because all nodes validate a transaction and contribute to consensus-based assurance, all participants can trust the data on the blockchain.

Shared authority:
No individual owner is responsible for a record’s integrity, meaning resilience is assured.

Immutability:
Entries cannot ordinarily be altered or edited, sustaining a permanent, indelible record.

Embedded controls:
It’s easy to automate processes through smart contracts.

Ease of reconciliation:
All participants work off the same data set.

These are powerful benefits that cannot be ignored — and have major potential implications for the future of accountancy.

“Entries cannot ordinarily be altered or edited, sustaining a permanent, indelible record …”

Innovating in vertical markets It’s been more than a decade since Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper in November 2008, describing a peer-to-peer electronic payment system using a ‘chain’ of ‘blocks’ secured by encryption.(Satoshi Nakamoto means ‘Central Intelligence’ in Japanese. Whoever he, she or they might have been, what is for certain is that they went on to establish Bitcoin.)

All these factors provide blockchain technology with great potential that has yet to be realised:

Agriculture:
Assuring the provenance of organic crops.

Banking:
Payment systems, meeting ‘know your customer’ requirements, funding trade debtors and tracking progress along a supply chain.

Identification:
Of groups of people such as refugees.

Medical research:
As a unique cryptographer to act as identifiers in clinical trials.

Property:
Land registry applications.

Shipping:
Tracking the whereabouts of shipping containers.

Smart contracts:
Embedding an instruction to pay in a block.