Bitcoin may or may not be in the future, but Blockchain surely will be. The next applications will be more legitimate.

In response to First US Real Estate Transaction in Blockchain: What’s Next? I received an interesting email from William Entriken.

He is working on the Ethereum project.

The project involves standardizing the process of transacting real estate assets on the blockchain. In techspeak that “non-fungible tokens”.

Entriken wrote a short article, starting with the basics, but it gets very interesting.

Blockchain Beyond ICOs by William Entriken

Right now cryptocurrencies (just one blockchain application) get the most press, but the next applications will be much larger and more legitimate.

What exactly is blockchain?

Blockchain is a digital system for notarizing documents. Think about documents you would notarize — recording the sale of a car or house, confirming your identity for access to government services, consummating a large business transaction. The purpose of notarizing a document is to establish that a particular person agreed to a specific thing at a certain time in some way that could be used as evidence in court, if necessary. Notaries have been a professional practice since at least the 14th century as popularized in England. But recently, a new system popularized the idea of a digital notary system, and then another created hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air.

The first digital notaries

If you have ever emailed versions of a Word file back and forth with a large team, you know this can be a painful experience. Maybe somebody forgot to turn on “track changes” and two people sent you updates at the same time which you will need to incorporate into one cohesive document. Somebody decided to make a system that tracks every version of a file and it would track every person that made each change. It did this in a way where the history is never lost which uses blockchain. This system is called Git and it is the first popular blockchain. Many companies offer a Git product including one company, GitHub, which Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion this year. But this is small potatoes. Next is Bitcoin.