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Brian Forde, director of Digital Currency at the MIT Media Lab, wants you to imagine the typical ticket-buying experience. You purchase a concert or a sports ticket online, usually on Craigslist, StubHub, Ticketmaster, or from a friend. On the day of the event, you walk up to the gate with your printed ticket. Maybe you're 95 percent sure the ticket will scan and you'll see a green "Go" arrow. But there's that other 5 percent that prompts butterflies in your stomach because you know there's a chance the ticket might have been duplicated.
Now, if you pulled up an e-ticket on your phone (bought with digital currency transferred directly from your wallet to the seller's), the ownership history of that ticket would sit right there in the blockchain ledger.Blockchain is most commonly known as the distributed data technology underlying bitcoin. But in a keynote entitled "Business Decentralized" at Singularity University's Exponential Finance conference this week, Forde stressed that blockchain is a way to take any digital asset—from a ticket or a song to all manner of money and data—and transfer it from one party to another without a centralized intermediary.
