What is blockchain as a technology?
By Govind G S on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
If you are a beginner and want to understand the technology this is where you start. This is the first of the series of blogs to simplify and to update about the latest developments in the blockchain technology.
Blockchain was introduced through Bitcoin or say it remains the underlying technology on which Bitcoin works. It is a distributed ledger technology. So let’s break it down word by word.
What is a ledger? Ledger is a book where we record transactions. Since these books or records come with page numbers it’s not possible to remove a transaction by simply tearing away a page, we can only append the change in the end.
So what is decentralised or distributed, it simply means that data is not stored in one central location but have copies stored in geographically different locations. So whenever a data is added it is replicated in all the storage points.
Advantages of this concept are
- Since all the data is not stored in a single location it is immune to data tampering.
- So what if someone changes the copy of the data he has? As the original data is available in all other nodes or systems when a new data is added the forged data will be simply discarded.
- As everyone in this network knows that none can change or manipulate the data, we can build a network with trust.
Now how does blockchain gets the name “BLOCKCHAIN”, yes as the name suggests it is a chain of blocks. The blocks are the set of approved transactions, say the transactions are Alice gives 100 coins to Bob and Bob gives 50 coins to Charlie, these transactions are added into a block. And when a new block is added the hash value of the previous block is also added to the next block. Hashing is simply generation of a value based on the content of the block, a good hashing algorithm will show a large change in value even for a small change in the data.
So if someone changes the content of a block somehow! Its hash value also changes and which is already stored in the next block, so that also has to be changed. But it is practically not possible to change the data in all the following nodes, because of
a) creation of a block requires the approval of a majority of member nodes.
b) a fake entry should not only be changed in one system but all other systems connected to it, in the case of Bitcoin the number of users are worldwide. So that becomes impractical.
This technology was too good to limit it only to the development of cryptocurrency. So the next blog will explain the Power of Blockchain technology.
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The purpose of ALTCOIN MAGAZINE is to educate the world on crypto and to bring it to the hands and the minds of the masses. This article was written and composed by Govind G S on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE.
