The Story of Blocks: Blockchain
“A person in the US squandered more than half a billion dollars on pizzas spending over 16,888,250 times the original price,” read the Blog’s headline, that gave me the very first clue as to what the story was actually about. I truly became rather captivated by everything that was said in the essay after reading it. That is how I first learned about Satoshi Nakamoto, how I came to understand decentralization, and how I first encountered the enormous, clearly printed term “BLOCKCHAIN.”
I myself am no professional but would definitely love to share how the story of blocks has now been a part of story of my life. Let me begin by stating what it is that I am highlighting on. It is, if not the most, then debatably one among the most hyped technology in existence today. Referred to as cryptocurrency, we have been familiarizing ourselves with it as Bitcoin. It is just a form of digital currency, and the term speaks for itself. It is a money in digital form, and Blockchain is the engine that keeps it running. It can simply be likened to our actual money, with greed acting as the driving factor.
The technicality would be addressed later but initially let us all know, why ‘Bitcoin’ or any other digital currency. This era has now emerged as an era of the Gen-Zs and something that Gen-Zs value the most after Free Internet, is definitely the 7-lettered word ‘PRIVACY’. We don’t like others interfering in things belonging to us, we love to control what we own and that is the power Cryptocurrency beholds within it. Currently, the physical money we have been using is regulated by a regulating body which, in Nepal’s case is The Nepal Rastra Bank. Everything, from value to quantity, is determined by the regulating body, which, at various times, may give it an unfair and unjustified authority. And Blockchain is something, that eliminates this power.
Let’s now discuss what we are talking about and how everything truly occurs. Blockchain is a chain of information-containing blocks, as the name suggests. Let’s first clarify why we truly need this using a simple example. Consider Jazz, a regular officer, who frequently visits a tea shop. Jazz consistently pays the bill at the end of the month, and the business’s owner keeps a record of Jazz’s orders. Now, when he goes to pay his money at the end of the month, it’s possible that the owner tampered with the record, adding orders that don’t even belong to him. In a similar manner, Jazz may claim that an order does not belong to him, even though it actually does. One of the ways to prevent this from happening might be hiring a trusted third-person to validate and authenticate the orders and record. But doing this just increases the complexity of the situation and also the expenses. But more crucially, it makes the power centralized on the third-person and creates something called ‘The Single Point of Vulnerability’. If the central database or the trusted third person is compromised then both the parties might suffer.
So basically, the concept of Blockchain has been introduced to improvise the data storage and management system. But its quite interesting to know that initially it was described by a group of researchers in 1991 to timestamp digital documents so that no one could backdate or tamper with them. Today, a Blockchain is a distributed ledger system which is completely open to anyone and they have an interesting property that once some data has been recorded inside it, it is almost impossible to change it. Each block in a blockchain is made up of a unique combination of characters known as Hash, which is similar to a human fingerprint. Talking about a specific block, it consists of three different things: the Data, Hash of the same block and Hash of the previous block. Talking about how is blockchain so secure, we can assume a blockchain of three blocks. As previously stated, each block is composed of a hash of itself and a hash of the preceding block, and this is how a chain is formed. If you tamper with the middle block, you are modifying its hash, which no longer matches the hash contained by block after it. As a result, all subsequent blocks become invalid, making the entire system secure.
This was the narrative of the revolutionary Blockchain. People often confuse Bitcoin with Blockchain however they are in no way similar to one another. Bitcoin, or Cryptocurrency in general, is an application of Blockchain. It can be used in numerous other industries including energy, media and entertainment, retail and what not. One thing I am certain about is, Blockchain is going to be a revolution in context of ownership and control. It is entirely up to us to flourish it in places like Nepal, and everyone should be aware that failing to get the most out of technologies like this would force an already lagging Nepal to lag even farther.
