From a business point of view you can look at what Blockchain means :

Removing middlemen: Imagine an energy trading platform where two parties could exchange energy without the need for a middleman to facilitate the transaction. They can deal directly with each other through smart contracts and avoid any fees or central control. This is quite an obvious one but it would take away billions in losses every year and save time in transactions

Transparency: If decentralised, blockchain could be a source of truth about various aspects of business processes that today are managed within opaque walls. It would give trust back to users who don’t necessarily know who they are dealing with when they start transactions online –this applies especially in financial services where KYC/AML (Know Your Customer / Anti Money Laundering) regulations are very high on everyone’s agenda due to recent global events which have shaken confidence in these types of transactions

Security: In a decentralised world, there is no single point of failure, which means blockchain-based networks are far more resilient to attacks. With a distributed ledger technology (DLT) every node has the same version of truth –unlike today where we have different databases all over the place with different versions being accessed by employees and customers based on how they log in –with Blockchain you only need one source of truth. This security does not come without problems as it would mean that all nodes will need to be online 24/7 making them vulnerable to cyberattacks; however, plans for mitigating this vulnerability are already underway e.g. through “light” clients or “smart” contracts

Transactions costs: With blockchain a transaction is sent to everyone on the network. The nodes, called “miners” will run complex algorithms to validate the transactions and for completing their task of running the software they are rewarded in cryptocurrency. They can also set up machines that mine cryptocurrencies along with validating transactions –a process which is quite expensive but very profitable as we have seen lately (one person has even made $400 Million this year from mining Bitcoin). This means that because miners receive rewards for running the network, they are incentivised to participate and continue doing so even if no one else is buying or selling

Smart Contracts: The idea behind smart contracts is that you program them once and they execute automatically when certain conditions are met; so if you have a system of smart contracts and they are all tied to each other on the Blockchain you can then program the business logic for your organisation. This means that in theory, if the computer code is written well enough, you should never need an employee again and everything would automate itself according to certain rules –now we’re getting into artificial intelligence…but probably not that far just yet

However, there are also risks or consequences to using blockchain :

Adaptation: Currently most people do not know about Blockchain; there will be no easy ride until everyone has adopted it as a standard practice. Nevertheless, this mass adoption will happen because it simply makes sense –companies are already investing significant amounts of money in blockchain initiatives and those who do not follow will arguably be left behind. It has been said that the internet’s original protocol, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) took about 10–15 years to become a standard worldwide; today you can go into any café or restaurant and they have free WiFi… but that was not always the case

Inefficiency: Distributed ledgers need to be accessed by all participants, which means everyone needs to contribute in real time –this may lead to delays in processing transactions or other events. In order for this to work properly it is necessary that each node has an identical copy of the ledger so any change made must be done on every node in real time; if one fails, then we have a problem. So for example if you were to buy a large house in the country, it could take a long time for this transaction to complete –this is because every node on the network would need to approve the transaction before it becomes final

Cost: If we are going off of Blockchain 1.0, then there will be significant costs involved as all nodes have to maintain their computational power and remain online 24/7 . This means that each node must cover data centres or servers which can potentially cost millions of pounds per year; some estimate that by 2021, blockchain technologies will cost businesses $60–70 million a year (Source)

Scalability: Currently with existing technology blockchains capable of handling 10s or 100s of transactions per second are being tested; however as it stands, blockchains cannot match the transaction speeds of the major credit card companies which can handle processing of thousands of transactions per second. This makes blockchain networks slow and therefore not scalable –if you want to conduct a transaction on a blockchain network you would have to wait for many other transactions to be processed first

Solutions: The best way around this is achieving scalability through off-chain solutions such as Lightning Networks (which involves channels between nodes). The idea behind this is that most transactions do not require real-time verification e.g. downloading an app does not need real-time validation, so what we can do is move these transactions off chain while still having the main interactions running on chain. The idea is that most users will be doing simple things like sending money to each other, or checking state updates and the more complicated tasks such as stock trading could happen off chain (Source)

*It is worth pointing out though that the Blockchain networks are extremely secure compared to banks; they use a system known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance which means that if one node goes down it doesn’t affect the network meaning that outside of natural disasters your transactions should always go through*

Another solution which is being tested right now in Ethereum for example is called sharding; sharding means partitioning data across multiple servers. The goal with this method however, isn’t to increase transaction speeds but rather to reduce them by spreading the computational load among many nodes. So each node does not have to process the entire blockchain but instead can simply verify its own region of it; this prevents them from having to carry out excessive amounts of computations and overloading their hardware (Source)

While we are still a long way off being able to handle the necessary volume of transactions which will come with mass adoption, these solutions will almost definitely get us there sooner rather than later

Conclusion: Blockchain technology is still in its infancy and while there are clear obstacles to overcome before it can be adopted on a global scale, there are also strong incentives for businesses willing to invest time and resources.