What does the future hold for applications of blockchain? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

I truly believe that blockchain as a technology has the potential of impacting the world as much as the internet did.

I vividly recall dial up connections with painfully slow speeds and constant disconnects. There was very limited functionality. If one was daring enough to perform a transaction (say pay a bill) the process was frustrating and, usually, not successfully finalized. A few years forward and we depend on the internet for our lives.

New technologies take a while to stabilize and transition from niche to mass utilization. I believe blockchain is still very much niche but will quickly become a part of our daily lives. We are now seeing corporate applications that leverage the blockchain. One of my favorite examples is the “seed to market” application being implemented by one of the major grocery stores. It allows them to pinpoint the origin of produce as well as trace its entire journey until it sits on the counter of a store. It sounds “vaguely interesting” but think of the huge savings it enables when something goes wrong and the grocery chain can now dispose ONLY of the damaged goods, rather than clear all stores!

This traceability enabled by blockchain will certainly be used on many other cases. We at IGWT are leveraging some aspects of blockchain to provide historical data on the life of a mobile device. Think of Carfax for mobile phones.

Our TessaB blockchain platform will allow participants to know the history of a phone as well as its current condition. This takes away the guessing game when buying a pre-owned device. The buyer no longer needs to “blindly trust” the seller.

I am certain that many other use cases will develop over time which will make blockchain an extremely common underlying technology for every day actions we will all take… some not even knowing what allows them to work properly… after all, who knows exactly what the internet is, even if using all day long?

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

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