Chain Reaction

Apparently I am redundant. Well, professional at least, even though I had not noticed yet and the piles of files on my desk may have you think otherwise. But according to people who know about blockchain technology, lawyers are going to be surplus to requirementsin the very near future, as are many other professionals going to be, from estate agents and bankers to music producers, because everybody will be transacting with their counterpart direct and without the need for intermediaries, whether you wish to buy or sell a house or stream music, all paid for P2P (peer-to-peer) by crypto currency (known as bitcoins to you and me).

Now, as somebody who is so firmly encrusted in the analogue age that I still use a paper Filofax (anybody else remember these?), I decided to find out whether it was time to give up my professiona and join a baking, dancing or cockraoch eating contest on television instead (wait: wasn’t that going to be redundant as well?!).

Now, in basic terms, a blockchain is a distributed database, where blocks of information are encrypted and stored simultaneously acros a vast network of computers in lots of different locations. When two users enter into a transaction, a ‘smart contract’ is created.

Gregor Kleinknecht, Partner

Read the full article in Discover Germany’s January issue on page 88 here and a PDF here.