Date of Graduation
5-2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Information Systems
Advisor/Mentor
Cronan, Timothy P.
Committee Member/Reader
Steelman, Zach
Abstract
Blockchain is one of these new and disruptive technologies being developed; it is predicted to change the landscape of business in an extremely similar fashion as the Internet did. In lay terms, blockchain is a new technology designed to secure privacy (Collins, 2016), cut out unnecessary middleman costs (Eha, 2017), dramatically lower the cost of transactions (Iansiti & Lakhani, 2009), lower transaction time (Underwood, 2016), and assist in making assets become more liquid and appealing (like cash) because they are more easily transferable (Paech, 2016). Blockchain functions like a ledger; it is able to keep track of an asset’s ownership by recording transactions made. It is likely that this is the direction the businesses are heading towards. Blockchain’s many applications across nearly every industry is simply too good of an opportunity to pass over. Governments can become more efficient in holding information, taxes, and property rights, while also reducing fraud (Brody, 2017). The financial services sector will be completely transformed and has already been successful in a few firms (Fanning & Centers, 2016). It has been used in a solar energy company (Rutkin, 2017), has been shown that it can assist in self-driving vehicle environments (Sharma, 2017), and will be able to solve many problems in the IoT landscape as a fundamental technology (Drubin, 2017). As technology progresses, there will be more solutions created to solve for the issues blockchain has in scalability and power consumption.
Keywords
Blockchain; Information Systems; Business Intelligence
Citation
Welsch, S. (2018). Blockchain: Is it the future of business?. Information Systems Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/isysuht/3
Included in
Accounting Commons, Business Analytics Commons, Business Intelligence Commons, E-Commerce Commons, Management Information Systems Commons