The decentralized personal devices can be anything from your mobile device to large mining rigs. The “miners” are reciprocated for their efforts through a share called tokens in the blockchain platform. Often in the form of cryptocurrencies.
Difference Between Centralized and Decentralized Systems
There exists a fundamental difference between blockchain and centralized systems like banking and finance. Centralized systems have a central repository of data and technologies that allow credible entities to read, modify, or delete information from the server.
Industries are considering blockchain because of their transparency, autonomy, and immutability.
The ledger, which contains information about every transaction, is maintained by individual systems existing on the nodes. It negates the presence of a single omnipresent organization, promoting transparency. You can read more on Coruzant about blockchain and ledger technology. But for now, let’s focus on the integration of artificial intelligence and blockchain.
The mining devices run automatically through pre-designed algorithms and laws. No device that benefits from the blockchain technology to mine and earn can make its own rules or change the existing ones. The autonomy of these devices ensures that every transaction is executed without any external interference.
There have been numerous discussions and research about integrating blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI). Let’s understand what those are and what is the future of such integration.
How Blockchain and AI Are Interlinked
Blockchain is interlinked with AI in more ways than we consider. The common integrations includes:
Transparent Data Source
Having ample data is quite important to train the AI application. As blockchain is arguably the most transparent technology there is, this can become a reliable source of refined data. Due to the traceability of nodes, the source of data can be verified quite effectively.
Autonomous System
The decentralized ledger technology ensures that no one server handles all the operations of the AI application. The autonomous system that drives the decentralization can manage the AI training and operations without being supervised, or in rare cases, being sabotaged by external parties.
Privacy Protection
Cryptography techniques like pseudonyms and shuffling strengthen the privacy throughout the network that runs AI training and operations. Having a robust privacy system in place is quite important for organizations that train and supply AI systems because of the competitiveness and complexity of the said technologies.
Distributed Computing Power
Training and maintaining AI technologies require a lot of firepower. Blockchain technologies take the hassle of maintaining top-notch computers within the perimeter and let individual devices take over the job. In addition to taking care of space constraints, blockchain technologies also ensure that the rising hardware, storage, and maintenance costs are curtailed.
Security
Blockchain smart contracts fundamentally aren’t very secure. As the technology revolves around the rigidity of the contracts, any loopholes already introduced can be exploited to harm the applications. To minimize the vulnerabilities, artificial intelligence is being used to generate smart contracts that are more secure than traditional ones.
Data Reading Efficiency
Blockchains often are limited by the low query performance due to the limitation of data storage modes. For the most part, the blockchain applications sacrifice the reading efficiency to achieve a more write-intensive approach with levelDB-a write-intensive database management system.
By using AI technologies, the data-storage methods can be enhanced for blockchains to use. A proposed novel TTA-CB protocol diminishes the issues of data storage technologies through the PSO algorithm. With rigorous testing and training, AI has been able to improve the speed of data queries of blockchain applications.
Future Applications of Blockchain and AI
Smart Data Grids
Large projects need huge data to be transacted. Traditional approaches require that data transactions are directed through a centralized system that supervises the process. Although heavily implied, the process is not as efficient as it could be with the help of blockchain and AI.
Distributed smart data grids break the information barrier that is presented by involving a centralized approach. The data sharing among multiple individuals or even projects can be more streamlined and economic.
Internet of Vehicles
Smart vehicles use AI to train the model that ensures handling and safety to the users. The huge data that all the vehicles gather is used to train the model. But there might be a trust and safety issue with vehicular communication that can jeopardize the whole point of smart vehicles if they fall into the wrong hands.
Blockchain technology mitigates the issue by being transparent, encrypted, and immutable.
Supply Chain Management
Traditional supply chain management systems are heavily reliant on mutually exclusive operations that often fail to convey the latest status of the product in the supply line. Due to being centralized, the whole process requires communication with a single node that directs the information to other operational parts. By using blockchain and AI, the whole process can be automated and distributed to become quicker and more efficient.
Healthcare
The healthcare sector requires data mobility and data privacy more than or similar to any other sensitive sector. But the healthcare sector is also more prone to cyberattacks because of being involved in sensitive matters that involve human lives.
Blockchain technology can ensure the data sent or received stays private, and AI solutions can patch the security risks before the attackers have found them.
Financial Transactions
Blockchains tokens are already being used in financial transactions throughout the globe. Many prominent financial institutions are also considering blockchain technologies to implement in their mainstream operations. And as AI has already been introduced to stock trading and other financial operations, the benefits of integrating blockchain and AI in financial sectors are immense.
Data Deposition
The Covid outbreak has shown us what data deposition can do in these kinds of events that affect millions of people. Data deposition, with the help of AI, can store, retrieve, analyze the data available on the events to help experts find testing frequency and vaccination supply solutions.
But, expired vaccines and fraudulent products are quite common in the supply chain. The blockchain technology was used to build a trust mechanism that ensured that the hospital and governments get genuine and fresh vaccines.
The Bottom Line
Blockchain and AI are complementary. While AI has found its way to every sector today, blockchain is yet to gain the confidence and trust. The applications that were made possible by integrating AI and blockchain are mainly used on a very small scale. But major organizations are considering investing and applying both the technologies together to achieve a more scalable and sustainable future for everyone.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.