# B for Blockchain

By [Hamza Azmi](https://paragraph.com/@hamza-azmi) · 2022-08-06

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Today is the day I graduate from a year long MSTM program at the Gies School. Completing 40 credits a year was daunting at first but extremely rewarding and I feel that the 2 credit block chain course at the end was a perfect cherry on the cake. It has left me intrigued with a lot of questions popping up in my every now and then as to what the world will look like in a few years when blockchain technology becomes mainstream with this course serving as an eye opener that the possibilities are not limited to just cryptocurrency.

When I look back now, I feel I learnt more than I bargained for with having learnt about so many topics in just a few weeks. I want summarize some of my Ah-Ha moments during the course:

1.  The time when I finally realized that Web3 is nothing but an extension or iteration of the World Wide Web with new concepts such as decentralization and token-based transactions.
    
2.  How blockchain is not a ridiculously difficult term to understand and that it simply is a distributed ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of records by clubbing them together in the form of blocks.
    
3.  How 3 of the more common crypto use cases are those that we hear about all the time:
    
    1.  Bitcoin which simply tries to bank the unbanked
        
    2.  Ethereum which overcomes the limitation of Bitcoin and provides a decentralised network for applications and smart contracts
        
    3.  IOTA which connects services and resources in the Internet of Things (IoT)
        

But, my learning was not limited just to these Ah-Ha moments as I also learnt about smart contracts, DeFi, NFT’s, Dex’s. A practical query writing exercise really sealed the deal for me as I got to understand how the back end of the various blockchain databases looks like.

I truly believe that Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize business processes in many industries, but its adoption requires patience. I expect governments to welcome blockchain benefits and begin to use it for improving financial infrastructure to start with.

Thank You Professor Sachdev.

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*Originally published on [Hamza Azmi](https://paragraph.com/@hamza-azmi/b-for-blockchain)*