BALTIMORE — A long time ago, I did a podcast series about cybersecurity — listen. here — And the last episode was about quantum computing. The gist of this story is that most of the efforts that have been made to make the Internet more secure have revolved around something called public-key cryptography (essentially passwords); It was the large size of the prime numbers that kept it safe. Holds mechanism in place.
Normal computers, even very large and powerful ones, cannot calculate these huge numbers quickly, but quantum computers can.This is why so many countries and private companies pour billions into We are working to develop more powerful quantum computers and quantum-proof the global public-key cryptographic infrastructure.
But the thing about quantum computers is that they aren’t necessarily faster or better at everything than “classical” computers, the 1’s and 0’s that we use all the time. That’s it. In fact, in many applications, classical computers perform better than quantum computers. In other words, advances in quantum computers are unlikely to make all classical computers obsolete. Although this is a cybersecurity threat, it is manageable and can have some impact as long as policymakers take it seriously. very useful application elsewhere.But it’s not digital Lord Vishnu, Destroyer of Worlds. It’s just a tool.
The same goes for blockchain. Blockchain is the indelible distributed ledger technology that underpins the cryptocurrencies you’re familiar with, such as Bitcoin and Ether. Not so long ago, there was a lot of hype about blockchain’s potential applications, most notably its potential. decentralize It removes the intermediation of banks and other financial institutions by making all types of financial transactions “trustless,” meaning independently verifiable and immutable.
The hype surrounding blockchain has subsided considerably since FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, was revealed to be a cryptocurrency exchange in November 2022. huge scam.So it was a bit of a surprise that I read in my local newspaper My city, Baltimore, is turning to this no-hype technology as part of its efforts to address the persistent problem of vacant and abandoned properties.
Even earlier, I did something like this podcast series We talk about vacant properties and why it’s so difficult to bring them back to productive use, especially now when the supply of housing is so tight and the costs so high. There is no easy answer to this question, but rather it is the result of a number of small obstacles and inhibiting factors that make the entire neighborhood a difficult place to live. One of those issues is the challenge of identifying vacant and abandoned homes and figuring out who they belong to. Although property records are partially digitized, it is not always clear who is the rightful owner of a home or even if the rightful owner knows if the owner dies. Apparently they have a vacant house in Baltimore. Figuring it out would require an expensive and time-consuming title search, and prospective buyers would likely spend the time and money they were trying to save by renovating a vacant home rather than buying it the old-fashioned way. I’ll suck it up.
Like quantum computing and code-breaking, this is exactly what blockchain, if designed and executed properly, can do faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the horse-drawn carriage systems that most cities use for real estate records. It’s a kind of thing. There are many ways such a system could go wrong, including entering false information into the blockchain, but at least it would make searches easier and the longer the system is in place, the more efficient it is likely to be. there is.
What I’m saying is that new technologies tend to have a kind of hype lifecycle. That is, discovery and what follows. irrational enthusiasm, followed by market adjustment, followed by practical application and widespread adoption. The discovery of radium in the early 20th century wave of health products This research was aimed at commercially exploiting the power of radiation to invigorate nature, but scientists later discovered that radiation was extremely dangerous. However, commercial use is limited.Blockchain doesn’t seem to be all that different – and perhaps now we’re not blind to the prospect of crypto being the most important the future of moneywe can finally see what this technology is actually capable of.