Makers Academy Day 59

Charlotte Fereday
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read

It’s slightly surreal to be starting our final group project, and that the end is in sight! However, it has meant an exciting opportunity to have free reign to learn new technologies as part of an awesome team. For our final project we’ll be building an online voting application, using blockchain technology.

What is Blockchain Technology?

In future posts I’ll be exploring the tech stack of our project, but for now I wanted to share more about what blockchain technology is. A refresher for those who already know it, and an introduction for those who don’t.

So what is blockchain?

Blockchain technology is believed to have been created by the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. In a nutshell, blockchain allows digital information to be distributed but not copied. It created the backbone of a new type of internet.

Originally blockchain was devised for the digital currency, Bitcoin, increasingly however the tech community is finding other potential uses for the technology. For bitcoin it served as a core component, to be a public ledger for all transactions.

Blockchain as google docs:

There’s an interesting analogy of blockchain being like google docs. A blockchain could be thought of as a spreadsheet duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. A bit like google docs, information held on a blockchain exists as a shared — and continually reconciled — database.

Also just like a google doc, the blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location, meaning the records it keeps are truly public and easily verifiable. No centralised version of this information exists for a hacker to corrupt. Given that its hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, its data is accessible to anyone on the internet.

Here’s William Mougayar taking this analogy further:

“The traditional way of sharing documents with collaboration is to send a Microsoft Word document to another recipient, and ask them to make revisions to it. The problem with that scenario is that you need to wait until receiving a return copy before you can see or make other changes because you are locked out of editing it until the other person is done with it. That’s how databases work today. Two owners can’t be messing with the same record at once.That’s how banks maintain money balances and transfers; they briefly lock access (or decrease the balance) while they make a transfer, then update the other side, then re-open access (or update again).With Google Docs (or Google Sheets), both parties have access to the same document at the same time, and the single version of that document is always visible to both of them. It is like a shared ledger, but it is a shared document. The distributed part comes into play when sharing involves a number of people.”- William Mougayar, Venture advisor, 4x entrepreneur, marketer, strategist and
blockchain specialist
, Blockgeeks

Benefits of using blockchain:

To wrap up, here’s a run down of some of the benefits of using Blockchain:

  1. It can’t controlled by any single entity.
  2. It has no single point of failure.
  3. Transparency: data is embedded within the network as a whole, therefore by definition it’s public.
  4. It cannot be corrupted: altering any unit of information on the blockchain would mean using a huge amount of computing power to override the entire network.

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Charlotte Fereday

Written by

Software Engineer @ThoughtWorks Co-organiser of Building an Equitable Tech Future 🚀 @codefirstgirls alumni 👨‍🎓

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