2017: the year when blockchain went mainstream | YourStory

While it was initially limited to geeks, software developers, libertarians, and cyberpunks, 2017 was the year when the virtual currency and its underlying technology started going mainstream.

It was also the year when we started seeing how it would change the world around us, rather than just hearing about the benefits of a trust-less society enabled by Blockchain (read this comprehensive guide to understand the tech, but long story short, it’s a decentralised, public ledger of records ).

The general population started realising that the most important things in our lives are mostly just records in some database. Think about it – our names, our citizenship, our bank accounts, our vehicle and land ownerships, our marriages, our fundamental rights, our laws, our court cases – all of these are just a record in some database.

And to protect the integrity of these databases, we have an authority looking after it.But what makes us trust the authority? We don’t know. The assumption, “we need someone to look after our data,” has finally been questioned. The pursuit to find an answer to this question led to an even stronger belief in a decentralised world, and the seeds of this finally germinated in the year 2017.Of course, the past 12 months were just crazy when one looks at the growth of the value of the cryptocurrencies – which surpassed all expectations. With so much happening within a span of just 365 days, it is important to look at the rear-view mirror into the wild world of virtual coins to put things into perspective.

As the year comes to an end, it makes sense to push out a yearly roundup of things that mattered in this space. Let’s begin.

Source/More: 2017: the year when blockchain went mainstream