Bitcoin Ethereum: How Blockchain Tech Is Revolutionizing Business | Fortune

One day last December, Frank Yiannas went to a Walmart store near company headquarters in Fayetteville, Ark., and picked up a package of sliced mangoes. Yiannas is Walmart’s vice president of food safety, and the fruit was part of a crucial experiment. He brought the mangoes back to his office, placed the container on a conference table, and gave his team a mission. “Find out where those mangoes came from,” he ordered, setting a timer.

It took six days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes to get an answer.

The time it took to compile and present all this information: about two seconds. (It clocked a similar time when Yiannas demonstrated it at Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting this summer.) In the event of an E. coli or salmonella outbreak, the difference between two seconds and six-plus days can be decisive, even lifesaving. But in the context of a supply chain, a blockchain is far more than an emergency measure: The granular, secure records in the system could help prevent fraud, and provide an easy-to-use interface for executives to keep tabs on the flow of goods, as well as for regulators to peek under the hood when necessary.

“This was not about chasing the shiny coin,” Yiannas says. “There were business challenges we were trying to solve.”

Blockchain boosters say its development is one that rivals, in significance, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping. That’s the revolutionary method of tabulating assets and liabilities that emerged in Renaissance Italy and that, according to some historians, put wind in the sails of capitalism, allowing investors and entrepreneurs to team up in corporations and launch merchant ships beyond the horizon in search of commercial success. Blockchains, in this analogy, are triple-entry bookkeeping, where the third entry is a verifiable cryptographic receipt of any transaction.

Source: Bitcoin Ethereum: How Blockchain Tech Is Revolutionizing Business | Fortune,