Tech thinks blockchain may be a fix for its problems

SAN FRANCISCO — Worried about someone hacking the next election? Bothered by the way Facebook and Equifax coughed up your personal information?

The technology industry has an answer called the blockchain — even for the problems the industry helped to create.

The first blockchain was created in 2009 as a new kind of database for the virtual currency bitcoin, where all transactions could be stored without any banks or governments involved.

Now, countless entrepreneurs, companies and governments are looking to use similar databases — often independent of bitcoin — to solve some of the most intractable issues facing society.

“People feel the need to move away from something like Facebook and toward something that allows them to have ownership of their own data,” said Ryan Shea, a co-founder of Blockstack, a New York company working with blockchain technology.

The man who created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-lee, has said the blockchain could help reduce the influence of the big internet companies and return the web to his original vision. But he has also warned that it could come with some of the same problems as the web.

Blockchain allows information to be stored and exchanged by a network of computers without any central authority. In theory, this egalitarian arrangement also makes it harder for data to be altered or hacked.

Investors, for one, see potential. While the price of bitcoin and other virtual currencies has plummeted this year, investment in other blockchain projects has remained strong. In the first three months of 2018, venture capitalists put half a billion dollars into 75 blockchain projects, more than double what they raised in the last quarter of 2017, according to data from Pitchbook.

Most of the projects have not gotten beyond pilot testing, and many are aimed at transforming mundane corporate tasks like financial trading and accounting. But some experiments promise to transform fundamental things, like the way we vote and the way we interact online.

SAM HODGSON / THE NEW YORK TIMES Ryan Shea is a cofounder of Blockstack, a New York-based company working with blockchain technology. First used with bitcoin, blockchain technology could reduce the control that big internet companies have over personal information, its advocates claim.