What, Why Blockchain?

Blockchain is one of the buzzwords in the tech industry right now. Even though the term blockchain is initially talked in the crypto space, now many industries are focusing on integrating blockchain into their day to day work. Food, Healthcare are some of the industries which have the necessity of integrating blockchain. Industry giants like Microsoft, IBM and Amazon are already providing blockchain platforms in the cloud for the developers to develop blockchain applications.

So, what is a Blockchain?

Simply saying, blockchain is a decentralized ledger/database, which means, the data is not centralized (resides in a single server). In a blockchain, all the nodes in the network share a copy of the data. So when you insert a new transaction to the blockchain, it will update the ledger in all the nodes.

Why blockchain is special?

• Distributed: All the nodes in the network have a copy of the ledger(data), code.
• No Data Tampering: As I said before, all the nodes in the network have the same copy of the ledger. Therefore, in ordered to hack the blockchain with a fake transaction, one should have a machine with at least the same computation power of 51% of the blockchain nodes computation power (this is nearly impossible with the current machines).
• Transparent/Shared: All the nodes in the network know about the transactions happening in the blockchain.
• Trustless protocol: Applications in the blockchain network (known as the smart contract) can run without any user interventions.
• Immutable: Data in the blockchain cannot be modified or deleted.
• No single point of failure: Unlike most of the current applications, where all the data is stored in one single server. The data in the blockchain is spread across all the devices in the network. So even if one node goes down, it will not result in the entire application to be down.
• No single authority: The important issue we had with most of the current applications is, the middleman involvement. For example, let’s take eBay. eBay connects buyers and sellers, and for the connection, they charge a commission fee. In such systems, the providers are spending a considerable amount of money for the middleman. But in the case of blockchain, you don’t have to or considerably less money to sell your product to the customer.