Cryptomania is dominating conversations from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. But ‘cryptocurrency’ is only one implementation of the underlying technology innovation that has the ability to transform the way future technology products are designed and built. Of course, that technology is blockchain, the decentralized digital ledger that makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies possible.  

First, we need to establish a common framework for the underpinnings of the technology. Its foundational element, the block, is a chunk of data that is packaged securely and then saved with a cryptographically secure reference to a previous block. Every block becomes part of a chain, and there is no mechanism for editing or deleting blocks once they are added.

While the data chain has strong cryptographic protection if it was saved in one physical place it would still be vulnerable to hacking. To address this a decentralized storage approach is fundamental to the blockchain design. The entire blockchain is replicated across multiple nodes in a storage network.  

Blockchain consensus works when each node conducts frequent checks with all other nodes to see if its image of the blockchain matches others’. This makes the blockchain invulnerable to hacks because a successful hacker would need to gain access to at least 51 percent of the nodes and simultaneously make the same change to all of them in order to convince the blockchain network the hacked version of the truth is correct. This is technologically infeasible due to the intrinsic security within each blockchain node.