Home » Business » How Bitcoin can disrupt and improve global supply chains and revolutionize industries
The world is slowly waking up to the fact that Bitcoin is much more than a digital currency. As well as being the world’s first functional peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Bitcoin’s immutable ledger can help streamline global supply chains and ensure the integrity of the data several key industries rely on.
How can Bitcoin do all of this, and in what ways can it improve things? Read on to see how the coin in Bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg.
A global ledger and data management system
When discussing Bitcoin and its capabilities, there’s no one better to listen to than its inventor, Dr. Craig Wright. For years, Dr. Wright has been telling the world how the Bitcoin system can scale to global dimensions, allowing all of the world’s data to be tied together on one single, immutable ledger.
Of course, this doesn’t mean all the world’s data would be publicly visible to everyone; privacy is possible, but hashes of the data can be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain so that only those with access rights can view it. In short, Bitcoin makes it so a time-stamped record of the data is stored on the immutable Bitcoin blockchain, but it doesn’t mean the data itself is right out in the open.
This has revolutionary implications for several industries, including insurance, accounting, logistics, healthcare, and supply chains. Let’s look at how Bitcoin could change things in these industries.
Logistics
Every industry in the world is impacted by logistics, and as we’ve all learned recently, when supply chains break down it has far-reaching consequences.
In a globalized world, importers and exporters in every industry need to know where goods are, when they’re likely to arrive, and lots of other important information such as origins, who currently has custody of the goods and more. Unless one works in the industry, it’s difficult to fathom just how much paperwork is involved in all of this and how fragmented the industry is. Endless amounts of admin are required to keep track of everything.
Bitcoin can help solve many of these issues. As a global database, it’s possible to store all of the important information such as certificates of origin, shipping instructions, packing lists, bills of lading, and other important documents on the blockchain. This would allow for the real-time tracking of everything with time-stamped entries pinpointing where everything is, who has it right now, where it will land next, and more.
Yet, more efficient tracking isn’t the only way Bitcoin can revolutionize logistics. Brian Choi has spoken to CoinGeek about how he plans to use it to help his organization, The Food Institute, meet its environmental and sustainability goals. Having easily accessible data on a public blockchain to prove you’ve been working towards reducing your organization’s carbon footprint certainly simplifies things. This is going to be an increasingly important part of the logistics (and every other) industry going forward.
Insurance
If there’s one word that gets to the essence of insurance, it’s liability. Who’s responsible when a regulation is breached or when something valuable gets broken while being shipped in from Japan? How can a hospital prove its medicines meet all of the required standards, so it isn’t liable when something goes wrong? How can insurers be sure that the documents they are being presented with are authentic? These things have to be proven, and doing so is an extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive process. With on-chain data and evidence, it all becomes much easier.
The key problem for the insurance industry is that it needs to be sure of the integrity of its data, but many firms are relying on data they can’t be sure is accurate or which exists on fragmented systems. This can all change with Bitcoin; insurers can keep sensitive data private while having on-chain systems that can be shared by all industry participants to ensure regulatory compliance, reduce risk, and pinpoint evidence.
The key feature of Bitcoin that can change the insurance industry for the better is time-stamping. Learn more about it by reading this article.
Accounting
When you truly understand what Bitcoin is, it’s obvious how it will disrupt the accounting and auditing industries. That’s no surprise; Bitcoin’s inventor was a career auditor, so he had this in mind when he designed it.
With Bitcoin, it’s possible for every financial transaction on the planet to be recorded on the blockchain. It never hits a scaling ceiling, so every payment from a businessman paying millions for a new yacht to a gamer making a micropayment can be recorded on the blockchain. This doesn’t lead to an Orwellian world where everything everyone is doing is visible; Bitcoin allows for privacy, but it does make it much easier for auditors and accountants to track, trace, and verify things once they’re given access to the relevant data.
For example, imagine an auditor is tasked with checking all of the outgoings of a large public company in a given quarter. If the organization ran on Bitcoin, they would be able to pull that data and use analytics software to do their work much more easily. This wouldn’t eliminate the need for human auditors and accountants, but it would make their lives much easier. Auditing software that utilizes the BSV blockchain is already being built and tested today.
As well as making processes more efficient, auditors know all-too-well that there are important regulations to comply with. Having your work time-stamped on the blockchain as you complete it makes it much easier to prove compliance, too.
As you can probably see, Bitcoin has huge implications for all elements of the financial industry. Auditors could discover fraud much more easily, it would be possible to verify a company’s financial position in real-time, and public bodies would become orders of magnitude more transparent overnight. What’s not to like about that?
Construction
Lone gone are the days when all of the source materials needed to build a hotel or a road were sourced locally. In today’s construction industry, it’s likely that the raw materials, tools, and even manpower involved will come from all around the country or the world.
Such an industry could benefit hugely from more accurate and efficient supply chains and better data management. Not only are there lots of important insights that can be gleaned from a bird’s eye view of such data, but compliance with the ever-growing list of regulations covering health and safety, ESG, and more can be made easier.
Dr. Maximilian Korkmaz has called construction “the most efficient industry” and plans to revolutionize it using the BSV blockchain, starting with apps that connect contractors on a local level and then tokenizing relationships and communication between parties. Whether or not he’s right that it’s the most inefficient industry, construction certainly could use a shakeup, and if Bitcoin helps firms prove compliance with H&S regulations and find cost savings, then it has improved the world, and that’s what it’s all about.
Healthcare
In the United States alone, healthcare is an $8.45 trillion industry. It has so many sectors within it that it would be difficult to think of, let alone list them all, but they all have one thing in common; they require accurate data to function safely and efficiently.
From hospitals tracking medicines to geneticists working on cures for diseases, data is the lifeblood of global healthcare. Yet, in today’s world, data exists in silos with access limited to a few parties. There are good reasons for this (namely privacy), but Bitcoin can allow parties to share useful data while maintaining the sensitive stuff they need to keep their competitive edge or to protect client privacy. Imagine how fast medicine could advance if all of the world’s medical statistics and raw data were available to machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence programs. It sounds like a dream, but it’s possible with a system that allows the sharing of data globally without compromising privacy.
Aside from the more fantastic use cases, Bitcoin can simply make things in the healthcare industry more efficient. It can break down the walls that segregate the industry, making it easier to track supplies, identify potential cost savings, find inefficiencies and bottlenecks in supply chains, and much more.
None of this is pie-in-the-sky, hypothetical dreaming. There are already several BSV developers working on applications for the healthcare industry. For example, VXPASS is leveraging the BSV blockchain to streamline processes and make things more efficient.
Learn more at the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai
If you found this article interesting and want to know more about how Bitcoin can revolutionize global supply chains for all of the industries mentioned above (as well as many others), join us at the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai this May. It runs between May 24-26, and if you can’t make it to Dubai, you can always join us online. We hope to see you there!
New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin—as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto—and blockchain.
