What is the Blockchain Technology?
"Blockchain" is a word everyone throws around these days, everywhere you go today on the internet people are discussing the blockchain, there are people that take advantage of the buzzword and popularity of this new and revolutionary technology to create scams like we have seen with bitconnect and many others, starting from fake projects to scammy ICOs.
After Bitcoin price started to fly in Q2 of 2017 many new investors have started to invest into these so called blockchain projects without really having an idea of what the technology implies or how it works. In this post i'll be trying to explain simply what the blockchain is and some of it basic aspects. If you are interested in this information to be able to understand at least a bit more those hefty whitepapers full of tech buzzwords and at least go with a bit more confidence when investing into a new coin because you understand a bit more what the project is about, then please tag along.
The Blockchain is just a way of maintaining a consensus on a decentralized, distributed network around the world. It works by having a lot of parties with no relation to each other and making them agree on the validity of data.
A new block of data is created every time a complex mathematical problem is solved, this process is called "mining". What goes into a block is simple data, any type of data can go into a block, for now the most used type of data in the blockchain is financial transactions but there are many projects out there working to create blockchains with different purposes, like elections for a example. I really like the prospects of using blockchain technology for elections and i hope to see it in use soon, just imagine clean, unalterable, incorruptible election results were no one can change the results and everyone can see in real time and transparently how the election is going, its going to be amazing.
The blockchain maintains a consensus of the data every time a new block is solved (the time can range between 1,2,5,10 minutes and even more, bitcoin for example has an estimated block creation time of 10 minutes) when the new block is solved everyone copy of the block chain is updated so all the other copies in each individual user participating in the mining process matches, this prevents people from changing the data on the blocks illegally, when you attempt to change the data of a block and summit it to the blockchain, it will be rejected because it won't match with the other participants copy of the data.
TL;DR : The blockchain basically is a completely unalterable as a historical record of whatever sort of data you want to store in it.
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Hi Luna
That was very informative. Thanks.
Lol – good luck getting corrupt politicians to agree to a fair election :p
Cheers
Anj x
We are going to force it down their throats like cryptos :-D there are more of us than politicians!
heheheh that's the spirit lol ggggrrrrrrrr XD
xx
Nicely written mate, good to get a basic understanding of Blockchain. Maybe something to add next time is that not only by Mining (PoW) blocks are created, but also by staking nodes (PoS). Semantics though, keep up the good work.
Thanks for commenting! I wanted to keep it relatively simple, i may do a post about PoS later and about certain coins that have hybrid PoW/PoS algorithms and maybe even some PoC, but for this one i wanted to keep it really simple, as close as possible to an ELI5 if you know what i mean.
agreed and good luck further. Looking forward to the next one then
An interesting post.
I would like to add some information. For example the validation process. You are right saying "mining" is one of the actual systems. The name of this method is Proof Of Work (POW) but is not very efficient... They spend too much energy.
You have one better call Proof Of Stake.
To understand better the differences you can check this article:
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/
Or read my article where I explain all about Ethereum Blockchain here:https://steemit.com/ethereum/@ddua/understand-ethereum-blockchain
Keep the great job! :)
Yeah, i didn't want to get too deep into the rabbit hole since i wanted to keep it relatively simple, i may do a post later talking about the more efficient ways to mine coins like PoS(Proof of Stake) or PoC(Proof of Capacity)
Great!! I will love read that post!
I'm waiting for it! :)
Very interesting post, keep it up
I still don't really get it. But you'll teach me eventually I'm sure :D
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Thanks for sharing what the blockchain is. I'm still quite confused until now so it's a good share to everyone here. :)
Resteem.
I made a similar post a couple of months ago that one of the good use of the block chain was in elections. It is anonymous yet transparent and cnnot be manipulated unless you change the whole blockchain.