Arizona Blockchain Development

We believe that the next level of profound change in technology is its decentralization, specifically with blockchains being used as immutable and trusted sources of truth in data. Blockchain development is something we have been doing in Arizona for many years.

Blockchain development for Arizona businesses

If you are storing data that is available to the public, you may wish to take advantage of the growing ecosystem that is Blockchain. Blockchain is simply a way that information can be put on a public ledger and is validated by an army of independent “miners” that ensure that content cannot be changed by any other party. This process was invented and proved with the Bitcoin protocol, but is being used in thousands of applications that often have nothing to do with currency.

The most obvious use of this technology would be to take public information that might be stored and managed by a government agency, and move it back to the public space. This not only provides a level of transparency that helps ensure citizenry that data is accurate and truthful, but also removes the obligation on the agency to be responsible for the care of the data. It removes the possibility of it being hacked, stolen, etc. by shifting its storage and validation to the community.

But the applications can be far more widespread. Any time you see an application to create or move data to a public ledger in some form, you have an application for Blockchain.

Private or Public?

We are strong believers that the concept of a “private” blockchain, in which only trusted parties are allowed access to the ledger, is an antithesis to the benefits of Blockchain entirely, and therefore we would prefer not to work on private blockchain projects. We see that the true value proposition here is a partnership with the public to have access to that data and have its content mined. There may be some restrictions that can be placed on such data updates, but this will require some level of faith by our clients that the data can be best housed outside of their control.

What sort of data can be stored?

The first generation of use of blockchain is around money or currency. This is a natural use because the process of mining the data requires vast amounts of energy and that needs to be paid for. The blockchain principle pays for this energy effort by way of creating an economy that injects new value into the space as generated by the miners. Therefore they are organically incentivized to mine and protect your data. You do not need to fund this effort at all.

We choose to use Ethereum as the basis of our blockchain initiatives because of its maturity and the army of miners already in place to validate data. It also opens up a world of smart contracts and distributed applications associated with the data, so that end user updates to the data could trigger contractual transactions as a result. This is something that hasn’t been seen before in technological history - we can create robots that are decentralized, stored on the Internet and managed by independent miners on your behalf. Additionally with Dapps (Decentralized Applications), we can move complete transactional programs to the blockchain and create a new capability - the “World Computer” if you like.

What about money or value?

The Blockchain’s greatest application to date has been Bitcoin. Therefore we embrace it as a new, virtual economy for the future. If you wish to migrate some of your business to Bitcoin, whether that be simply by accepting it as a payment method, or using it to transfer value to your trading partners, we can help. We have been using Bitcoin since 2011 and have found it to be an incredible opportunity to embrace value transfer across borders with the same level of simplicity as sending an email, or a selfie to someone anywhere on the planet, without any counterparty or middle man involved in the transaction.

We also realize that other currencies might be a better fit for an application, and will trade off the best fit for the job here. But by default we believe that the public awareness of Bitcoin and number of stakeholders in its success proves that it should be considered the first option for value transfer.

Storing content on the Blockchain

The next generation of this technology is rapidly coming - IPFS. IPFS stands for the Interplanetary File System and represents a “world hard drive”. Using IPFS as a way to store content removes the need to use any CDN (Content Data Network) such as DropBox, and puts the power back in your hands. If you have large bandwidth applications (like broadcasters, or archival storage, etc.) then IPFS is a perfect fit. Its available to use today and we have already been successful moving vast amounts of content to it.

It is empowering the next generation of distributed media. Sites like YouTube are being threatened by d.tube, which run on IPFS. Sites like SoundCloud are being threatened by dsound.audio. And sites like Twitch are being threatened by sites like dlive.io. This puts control of content back in the content creators hands.

We have developed specific technology to take advantage of these services, but integrate them into existing technologies (like RSS feeds, etc.) and we can make available this to our clients. If you had been considering publishing large amounts of video content, for example, but are not comfortable with the enormous bandwidth costs, you should no longer consider this an obstacle as IPFS allows everyone to share out some of their bandwidth and storage content to store everything and its mined like other blockchains as an incentive for people to do so.

A rapidly evolving ecosystem

Blockchain comes in many forms and evolves each day. As we discover more opportunities for our clients, we are sure to help the migration to Blockchain along in all of its forms.