Blockchain Master Class: Blockchain Overview & Concepts

Date: 17-Mar-2018
Venue: RISE MUMBAI, 19th Floor TowerPeninsula Business Park, Mumbai
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Note: This post has all the blockchain technical information of my session.

HISTORY/TIMELINES:
2008: whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto on blockchain and bitcoin
2009: first bitcoin created(mined)
2013: Ethereum proposed in whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin (link1; link2)
2014: First Ethereum software project; Ether tokens sold and funds raised
2015: Ethereum “Frontier” launched
2016: Ethereum DAO crowdsale; subsequent hack; split into Homestead
(ETH) & Classic (ETC)
2017 (Jul): Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 launched

BENEFITS FROM BLOCKCHAIN in SIMPLE TERMS:

Basic benefits from blockchain

Aren’t well designed traditional systems tamper-proof? What is the additional immutability given by blockchain?

Non-blockchain systems can be tampered by circumventing application layer

How does blockchain accomplish tamperproofness?
Using following 2 techniques:
1) Cumulative hashing
2) Decentralization

Tampered block goes out of sync with next block

Decentralization gives immutability & removes single point of failure vulnerability

Low Thru-put:
Present popular blockchains has comparitively much lower thru-put compared to established RDBMS based systems as illustrated by below examples:
-Bitcoin — under 9 tps
-Ethereum — under 25tps

In contrast real world Enterprise applications (implemented with RDBMS) tps are as follows:
-Visa database does average 3000 tps and was estimated to scale to 10000 tps
-Paypal — 193 tps (6.1billion in year 2016); 450tps on 2015 Cyber Monday