The Future of Trust: Blockchain!

      The biggest revolution after electricity and internet…

We’ve probably all heard of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies recently, but do we really fully understand the underlying and disruptive technology that they rely on? In this article we will talk about the future of trust: Blockchain!

Back to 1982 and a brief history of blockchain

• In his dissertation in 1982, cryptographer David Chaum presented a blockchain-like protocol for the first time.
• Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta described additional work in 1991.
• Haber, Stornetta, and Dave Bayer increased the efficiency of the architecture by including Merkle trees in 1992. Since 1995, their document certificate hashes have been published in The New York Times every week under their company Surety.

Following the global financial crisis of 2008, an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto created an unprecedented document: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The first conception of decentralized blockchain was based on this innovative and enhanced design. The terms block and chain were used independently in Nakamoto’s original paper until 2016, when they were merged into one phrase, blockchain. And this fueled a complete new era in technology and probably the most significant revolution after electricity and internet...

The technology adoption curve of crypto users vs. total worldwide internet users is depicted in the diagram above. Crypto has a far faster adoption rate than the Internet, with an average annual growth rate of 80%.

What if we try to sum up blockchain in a single sentence?

“Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, continually updated and immutable ledger that records the history of transactions in a chronological order.”

So what is blockchain and why is it so unique?

Let’s start with the structure of the name:

Block: the file is made up of data blocks + Chain: each block is connected to the previous block, forming a chain.

Blocks store the hashed and encoded records of valid transactions in a hash tree. A hash is a string of letters and numbers, that serves as an unique fingerprint for every block in the blockchain. The blockchain is made up of a sequence of blocks, each of which contains the hash of the previous block. This repeated process is performed to ensure the integrity of the prior block to the genesis block, which is the first block.

When a transaction in a block changes, the block's hash changes as well. When the block's hash changes, the next block displays a discrepancy with the previous hash it stored. As a result, blockchain has the distinct characteristics of being tamper-proof.

The blockchain stores data in a huge network of computers known as nodes, each of which has a copy of the blockchain. Every time a new block of transactions is added to the network, all members must check and verify that all transactions in the block are genuine. The new block can only be added to each node's blockchain when it has been approved by all nodes in the network. This process is called consensus.

To summarize, anyone attempting to attack or edit data on a blockchain must change the majority of computers in the network, which is how blockchain functions as a highly secure data storage technology.

To summarize, here are some key points!

Blockchain is:

• Distributed because it is a massive global spreadsheet that operates on millions of computers.
• Open source because it’s published transparently and it’s not owned by any company, institution or individual.
• Peer-to-peer because it does not require intermediaries to validate or settle transactions, which makes blockchain a viable solution to the problem of insecurity and exploitation by central authorities, platforms and organizations.

Without a question, blockchain technology’s core and unique characteristics may be applied to a variety of industries, creating new potential opportunities for the future.

Here are some examples of real-world blockchain use cases that can be applicable for enterprises, institutions, and governments:

• Payment Systems & Cryptocurrencies
• Cyber Security
• Supply Chain Management
• Advertising Insights
• Networking & IoT Operating Systems
• Insurance
• Private Transportation & Car Sharing
• Online Data Storage
• Charity Ecosystem
• Voting Mechanism
• Secure Sharing of Medical Data
• Music Royalties Tracking
• Retail Industry
• Real Estate Industry
• NFT Marketplaces

In the next articles, we’ll go through in depth how above-mentioned blockchain use cases will reshape the future in numerous industries. Don’t miss it!

      A blog post by The CryptoLab

Workshop: Personal Branding Beyond Linkedin

 Blog post by Mireille Francis, ESSEC Global MBA Student Ambassador

On Saturday the 19th of November, students from the Strategy & Luxury track attended Youri Sawerschel’s Personal Branding workshop to help the students get their personal brand into shape, stand out during interviews, and make networking easy. One thing that stood out from Youri's presentation was his quote on Personal Branding:

“If you are smart and do a good job, you only have the basics to enter the game. Personal branding is about knowing who you are and where you want to go”  

- Youri Sawerschel 

A strong personal brand is key to successfully reach your professional objectives. Original teaching techniques were used to acquire and validate various hard and solf skills. 

Students enjoyed their Saturday at le Coeur de la Défense campus in Paris, reflecting about their past and future path and working on taking ownership of their career goals. They were able to define a roadmap and think outside of the box by doing many group and individual exercises. 

We asked one of our classmates on what he learnt during the workshop:

 “Yesterday’s workshop taught by Youri Sawerchel was definitely something to remember. Among many other things, it allowed me to think long-term by looking back, a process I had not encountered before. We took time to write our own obituaries (an interesting exercise for sure) which allowed us to reflect on our successful careers before the end of our lives. By jotting down what a successful career looked like in my eyes, I unknowingly wrote a career plan that I would be thrilled to progress through. It helped me set specific goals for myself in a very simple, yet ultimately effective manner”  

- Santiago Xavier Elizalde, Strategy & Digital MBA’22

In a nutshell, students were advised to become the CEO of themselves, define their vision, anchors, topics and eventually take the right decisions accordingly. 

What do we learn in our Strategy course?

By Jennifer Thomas, Global MBA Luxury Brand Management major, 2019-2020

Strategy without process is little more than a wish list – Robert Filek

As future managers learning how to identify critical issues in a situation, acknowledging the challenges, making best use of your organization’s resources and implementing a focused and concentrated course of action are some of the key expectations that any organization will have from us after we join them. Often, we tend to overlap what we want to achieve (goals) with what we need to do (strategy). But like Professor Maciej warns us, goals are NOT strategy. So, how and where do we learn these nuances?