(New York, NY) — For those who are tired of hearing from coworkers about they’re outstanding returns on bitcoin investment, they’d probably be amused to hear CNBC is reporting that the cryptocurrency is practically “worthless, and and will perform worse than stocks in the coming months.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t value to the technology behind it. Take real estate, for example: there are a variety of constraints hindering real estate brokers.
“If a broker wants to locate a property in New York City, he can search several different portals and see the same property listed under varying names. If an agent wants to attract an international buyer, he has to take additional marketing steps to obtain global exposure. To close a deal, paperwork is passed back and forth in the form of email that often leads to miscommunication and transaction delays,” writes Stephen King in a Forbes column.
King’s solution: “By establishing a base layer of universally accessible and usable data, information and records, we can literally reinvent real estate from the ground up.”
One way to do that is through a certain technology that serves as a function for bitcoin: blockchain.
When someone requests a transaction through bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, the request is broadcast from computer-to-computer, validated and added to a digital ledger or “chain” of that person’s previous cryptocurrency transactions.
This blockchain is decentralized, meaning it can be viewed from anywhere by anyone, sort of in the way that Google Docs works.
By applying the blockchain system to real estate, brokers and signers can all access the same type of contract or legal document at the same time, instead of passing them to each other or potentially misplacing versions of that document.
“Challenges like scaling, privacy, identity, regulation and cross chain interoperability still need to be overcome,” writes King. “It’s still early days in blockchain technology development, but the future looks bright.”
