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Credit to Author: Ken Mingis| Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2019 03:00:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n Ok, so maybe blockchain isn’t ready yet to become the biggest new technology since the internet<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the distributed ledger technology clearly made strides in 2018, when it was embraced by companies from Walmart<\/a> to shipping bigwig Maersk<\/a> to top tech venders like IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft<\/a> who see potential in blockchain-as-a-service<\/a>. (Walmart’s\u00a0vice president in charge of food safety,\u00a0Frank Yiannas, compared his embrace of blockchain<\/a> to a “religious conversaion.”)<\/p>\n So while it might have been overhyped early on, and may now be in what Gartner describes as the “trough of disillusionment,”<\/a>\u00a0it still clearly has a wide variety of uses across a number of industries, according to Computerworld<\/em>\u00a0senior reporter Lucas Mearian.<\/p>\n In fact, as he explains to Executive Editor Ken Mingis in this episode, blockchain could underpin everything from real estate transactions<\/a>, new crypto-currencies (including one from Facebook?) to voting in elections<\/a> and even personal identities. That last one could prove particularly useful to people if it actually eliminates the need for passwords in the years ahead<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of which is to say that while blockchain hasn’t upended the technology ecosystem \u2013 yet \u2013 it’s well on the way to worming itself into a lot of places<\/a>.<\/p>\n For an audio-only version of this episode, click play (or catch up on all earlier episodes) below. Or you can\u00a0find us on iTunes<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Pocket Casts<\/a>, where you can download each episode and listen at your leisure.<\/p>\n