GE Reports | By: Mark Egan & Dorothy Pomerantz | GPE – July 25, 2017:
Ben Beckmann works as the lead scientist in the complex systems engineering lab at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York. In 2012, he made a seemingly inconsequential wager: He bet one of his colleagues that the electronic currency bitcoin would fail.
Originally published – May 22, 2017: Bitcoins started trading for pennies after the currency launched in 2009. Today, you can buy one bitcoin for $2,200. Beckmann lost the bet and took his colleague for a nice meal. “If we had taken the $100 we spent on dinner and invested it in bitcoins at the start, we would be millionaires,” Beckmann laughs.
Losing the bet pushed Beckman to take a closer look at the code behind bitcoin. He and others at GE discovered that the real magic that made it work was a public digital ledger called blockchain that keeps a chronological record of all bitcoin transactions. But the currency is just one blockchain application. The technology could be used for tracking trade, contracts, and even renewable energy.
Like the Internet, the blockchain is potentially unlimited in size. It’s also secure because it doesn’t need a central clearinghouse that could be hacked. Instead, the record of all transactions is distributed and duplicated across computers in the particular blockchain network. “Today, blockchain is where the internet was in the 1990s,” Beckmann says. “I believe it has the same potential.”
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