What is Blockchain in Nutshell
With modern era’s rapid pace of technology advancement, the awe of revolution seem to be subtle and short lived. Smartphones, for instance, have only been around for a decade but the revolution they have brought into our lives have now been presumed as ubiquitous.
Today’s Generation Z or Post Millennial generation is witnessing another reticent revolution: Blockchain.
What is Blockchain?
For the uninitiated, it is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records, called “blocks.” But there is a lot more to it than what it appears. The blocks are linked and secured using cryptography. Until very recently, cryptography was synonymous with encryption, but that perception has been replaced with its association with mathematical theory and computer science practice.
Each block comprises of a cryptographic signature of the previous block – also known as a cryptographic hash, a timestamp and transaction data. A blockchain is inherently incorruptible. It is an open, efficient and secure distributed computing system with high ‘Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)’. It is a permanent and verifiable digital ledger of not only financial transactions but virtually anything of value such as events, medical records, and other records management activities, such as identity management, transaction processing, documenting provenance, food traceability or voting.
All blockchain information appertains to a shareable and continually reconciled database. The database isn’t stored in any single location, implying that the records are publically accessible and verifiable. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority.
Blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym, in 2008 for use in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, as its public transaction ledger. The invention of the blockchain for bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server.
