possible applications for Blockchain technology

5.1 From Financial Applications to Nonfinancial Applications

The impact of cryptocurrencies and the technology behind them is not just lim-ited to the widely encompassing economic sector. The technological innovation behind cryptocurrency has its roots in information technology, embodying math-ematics and cryptography. On this level, it is clear how cryptocurrency technol-ogy can be adapted for a variety of other application uses beyond the financial field. The blockchain technology, originating from Bitcoins and currently used in

other cryptocurrencies too, is underpinned by a distributed database that main-tains a continuously growing list of data records that are designed to be hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data. This record is enforced cryptographically and hosted on machines working as the data store’s nodes. Essentially, the blockchain method allows for records to be stored in many places, yet enables redundant, repeated, or conflicting instances of record nodes to be identified and avoided. In other words, blockchain technology can be used to solve any problem involving the need for distributed, decentralized comput-ing events and the robust ability to verify and authenticate a new event to ensure its uniqueness. Herein also lies the core advantage of the financial application:

numerous transactions can be managed online from undetermined location points, while maintaining the ability to authenticate these transactions before they become confirmed.

Cases of blockchain application have been increasing by the day. One can eas-ily see how the technology could be used in an application where assets are linked to a blockchain and then traded digitally, with improved security compared with traditional methods—even commodities such as physical bars of gold, silver, and diamonds are being tested for authentication by blockchain. Blockchain could be applied to all cases where the sale and purchase of digital assets are involved and anti-counterfeit measures need to be improved—for instance, digital security trading, document and information exchange, and delivery over multiple com-puters. Likewise, any operation that requires authentication of personal identity and proof of ownership in a distributed context could be greatly improved. This can even include, for example, patient record verification, employee peer-review authentication, smart contracts, real estate ownership, birth certificate manage-ment, and voting management [70]. All in all, because the range of the aforemen-tioned applications is very wide, it is helpful to divide it into smaller domains.

Figure 5 presents and further elaborates on the four main application domains for blockchain technology: smart contracts and identity, monetary systems, se-curities, and ledger and record keeping [71].

Fig. 5. Prime application areas of blockchain technology (adapted from [71]).

5.2 Is Blockchain Paving the Way for a Digital Product Lifecycle Management Revolution?

It is evident that blockchain technology presents not only a computational inno-vation, in the form of a new database schema, but also a direct cause of subsequent economic innovations in implementation. In a way, the real significance of block-chain’s cryptographic innovation is in its influence on the traditional economic models. Blockchain enables trust to be maintained between large-scale peer-to-peer activities, and thus it can be seen as the driver of the essential ingredients of an open “shared economy.” Due to trust issues and the susceptibility of any system to be misused, great efforts have been invested in protecting and policing operations. Just imagine how much waste and inefficiency could be saved given the existence of a fair and open operational context in which suspicions of coun-terfeits or even unintentional duplicate events are void.

This ideology is of course evident in many problem domains where cloud or distributed computing is employed to facilitate operations, and where duplicates of operational events or entities pose a challenge. Numerous examples can also be inferred from the product lifecycle management context. The term product in this case would include any artifact that is engaged in a design-production-oper-ation cycle, such as vehicles, buildings, machinery, tools, clothing, and mechani-cal components or assemblies. Product lifecycle management is ubiquitously digitalized in the modern era and thus heavily reliant on data and information exchange about a product’s components, elements, and associated attributes.

Consider the design management of a cruise ship or passenger plane, for

instance. Design data are generated by large design teams spread over many disciplines and even geographical areas. There are also often dozens of subcon-tractors working on the design under possibly numerous main consubcon-tractors. From the beginning, this makes the coordination efforts of the design quite complex and inherently fraught with errors that cause rework in the interfaces, which are exacerbated by the human-regulated communication streams. Moreover, often the production or construction of the product may begin even before all the detailed designs have been finalized. These design-management and change-management challenges are ubiquitous within all complex engineering designs, including those for buildings, industrial plants, and other infrastructures. Design data management over the product lifecycle can be quite controversial, as there are usually sensitivities regarding the ownership of the data and whether certain data need to be kept confidential for certain groups of designers. Therefore, despite the noble vision of open communication during design, not all project participants may have authorization to view or modify the data, which is a big challenge, especially because designs are typically done digitally and, more often than not, in the cloud in shared models.

Blockchain technology, and its cryptographic basis, can well address these challenges of design operations. Blockchain technology can be used to ensure the provenance of data (who accountable for which part of the design data, and how dependable the data are), the identity of users in an open cloud environment, and the validity of access rights to different parts of the data. Overall, it is ideal for engineering designers to publish all design data openly online, not only for the purposes of design and production teams, but also to allow users of the product to provide input when appropriate. Feedback from users would allow designers to improve their understanding of the implications of their designs throughout the many phases of the lifecycle. However, these ideologies of product lifecycle management that still haven’t been fully achieved.

If the management of data access could be totally autonomous (similar to how blockchain technology has paved the way for the regulation of secure fi-nancial transactions), all project participants over the lifecycle of the product would be more likely to share their information with less concern. Designers, contractors, and operations would be able to garner much higher levels of trust amid the complex product design/production/operation processes, without the impedance of defensive provisions to ensure data security and user authen-tication. Blockchain is potentially a mechanism that could bring these kinds of functionalities into distributed computing settings in the cloud—that is, semi-open information sharing without any centralized servers—while maintaining the reliability of all data transactions and the authenticity of the people making

those transactions in real-time settings. The value of blockchain technology in engineering design management, and its comparison to financial transaction management, is clear.

Cryptography, a fundamental branch of mathematics, is not just limited to specific application fields. Blockchain technology is merely a name bestowed upon one rather successful use case, that of Bitcoin transaction management;

however, it does not need to be confined to the financial context. Indeed, block-chain technology, used in tandem with Bitcoins, lends itself to helping people better understand the underlying mechanisms and logic behind its value.

Nevertheless, from the mathematical perspective, the use of blockchain can be broadened to almost any context concerning shared data, and with the current mass digitalization trends in almost all fields, shared data is becoming a default condition.