I have been telling this for years to those I come in touch with but only now they start to realize the potential of Blockchains based on cryptography in order to guarantee that something has been created in a very specific point in time. Immutability was always my thing, before Satoshi´s blockchain solution there was just chaos and tampering with data all over the place.
You probably don´t remember this, but when email started to become used in universities like mine, in those Unix machines and we had names@ips as accounts to communicate with those in our local network at the time or the irc groups and so on… governments did not really believe in the internet… email was believed to be something for kids who were just playing with computers… governments did not have websites and banks did not allow or did not even have a website to access your accounts and operate.
SO here we are again and governments are just blind once more… but now I am less naive and I think now that it is not blindness but most probably corruption. There is no reason a government would not want a blockchain to make everything transparent and traceable, unless they want to hide something. I remember how people loved to “touch” those old books with the budget of institutions… no one could ever notice a modification was made after a vote and thus they could say something, vote something else and print whatever they wanted.
I remember using hashes in the year 2002 when I wanted to keep track of changes when writing the new statutes of my University. It was challenging, I wanted to be sure the version we approved one day had not been changed so I used to hash that. In those days we had MD5 (now is not secure at all) but I used it anyway and caught the changes rapidly… I installed some wiki local as well so I could spot the version changes and I was happy when I spotted a change and could bring it up in some other meeting.
Slowly, hashing the data was proof that nothing had been changed, when the hashed new articled matched the previous hashed version. It was very early though and no one did really understand it completely but was my little tool and secret for a while.
Today, there is more awareness and probably more people understand the blockchain as a sequence of hashes that refer to the previous ones and that they can not be changed if the network of computers that validate them is wide enough, decentralized enough.
I really hope tokenization will be a daily thing in the years to come, I am still surprised how, as an example, domain names have not been yet tokenized by Verisign so buyers and sellers can trade them easily without third parties… well, maybe I am not that surprised at all.
