How Blockchain Technology will Change WordPress?

Bitcoin is the first decentralized currency which was started around eight years ago. Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin. Bitcoin works by distributing coins among those which provides processing power to verify transactions. Bitcoin is a smart way to incentivize adding the computational resources the system needs. The coins are created through “mining” and they can he exchanged for Dollars, Euros or other currencies. This gives them value and an incentive to convert old currency into Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not the only blockchain. Any application of blockchain has to link the value of the coin to the goal of the network. If the goal is to provide distributed computing power than the coin has to be created by providing computing power. The goal can be anything.

As WordPress is an open source platform similarly Blockchain also supports creativity and open source concept. Developing a WordPress website is easy as you can hire WordPress developers to do that job for you but Blockchain technology still needs lots of research. Although ultimately it will help WordPress websites a lot as we will discuss in this article.

Now talking about Blockchain, you can imagine blockchain as the way by which you develop a program which incentivizes those who share its goals to run it and take profit from it. This is also the concept behind open source. Most people contribute to WordPress through code, community, documentation, translations etc because they think that this will benefit them as WordPress users and WordPress professionals. Blockchain is an algorithmic approach to optimize the mutual benefit of technology. How can we start using it in WordPress? Lets discuss that. We will discuss here about some cool ways that blockchain technology will change WordPress.

Applications of Blockchain Technology

People often go for WordPress development services if they need any type of website be it a blog, news or e-commerce site. One way blockchain technology is used in WordPress is as a payment gateway for eCommerce plugins. Lets talk about the three ways blockchain technology can apply to WordPress:-

For Identity Management and Verification

Right now one of the biggest challenge is to verify identity online. There is a weakness in the username and password model. One of the common problem WordPress websites are facing is sites get hacked with stolen or cracked passwords. There are many new blockchains being developed to encrypt personal information in the blockchain and then allowing users selectively share that data. This can be used to login to apps, verify identity and securely share personal information with employers or service providers whenever needed.

For Content Monetization or Rewarding Content Creators

One of the biggest challenge for the web is to find a better way than displaying ads to compensate content creators. A website, Medium recently announced that they were adding a ”clap”button to articles. A clap is similar to a like but also is a part of the algorithms for paying content creators. Medium is trying to solve the problem but they have to do much more.

It is a good idea to split money among content creators based on an algorithm that takes into account page views, likes and other similar factors. But applying that into a distributed network is a challenge.

In the old internet, a content monetization service like AdSense, required one central trusted entity to define the algorithm and handle the payments. Blockchains are by design distributed and trustless.

A blockchain based content monetization service will not require a single trusted entity at the center and the algorithm should be optimized for all stakeholders.

Hence there is a lot of scope and potential to remove selling ads for content monetization. But it would also require a new input of money or other valuable data.

For Secure File Storage

Right now in WordPress, we store the files on the same server that WordPress is running on or we can also offload that to a service like Amazon s3 which is a smart strategy for scaling WordPress as s3 are infinitely large and distributed application processing across multiple services which leads to high performance. Decentralized cloud-storage is a rapidly emerging technology. There are services which allow users to sell unused space in their network for tokens which can be exchanged for storage or other currencies like bitcoins. You can also buy their tokens in exchange for use of the file network.The data stored in the decentralized networks is encrypted so that only the owner can read it. It is stored for higher reliability and it is also cheaper than s3.

Conclusion

Although internet has so many benefits and people around the world use it for different purposes. The current implementation of web has led to Facebook and Google acquiring a monopoly on the data needed to sell ads or to create engaging social networks or in other applications. This created an inequity in the internet. Blockchain is a tool which can fix this bug and to make internet much more useful whether it is for file storage, eCommerce or for paying creativity.

This is very exciting to those who believe in the open source concept. WordPress developers are more interested in this because they have the experience of witnessing the phase in which a cool open source technology, a PHP blogging software i.e WordPress became huge popular on the internet. Similarly, as we have just discussed, in next phase Blockchain technology will change WordPress.