What is Blocknode ? Decentralization ? Sustainability ? Security ?

What is Blocknode ?

 Decentralised Employee and Customer Reward System .Want to implement a rewards system in your business? Instead of leaving funds aside in a low interest bearing account for employee bonuses or loyalty rewards: setup aBlocknode masternode to start generating BND tokens. These tokens can be traded for Bitcoin on an exchange or could be accepted back by the partner business as a discount.  This is real world value, accepted the world over and not just a points system. By positioning the customer as the most important person in this system and yet still supporting the end goal of the business, we offer a simple and flexible solution: saving costs and increasing productivity. 

Decentralization ?

 One of the main driving forces pushing the rapid growth and adoption of blockchain technology is its decentralized design. Meaning that not one single entity has control over all the transactions. Traditional methods of payment require you to trust a third party like a bank or government who then keep accounting records in a central database which only they have access to - and usually at an inflated fee. A simple example to explain this better is the following: if Bob sends Alice $100, a   third-party service would debit Bob's account and credit Alice's account, therefore they would both have to trust that this third-party is to going do the right thing. With most cryptocurrencies, the ledger (blockchain) is shared and public, therefore no third-parties are needed, because everyone can verify the information. Let’s go through some of the advantages of using a protocol like this over a traditional centralised system.

 Sustainability ?

 Bitcoin mining alone uses an astronomical amount of electricity - 250 kWh per transaction. That is enough to power an average home for 9 days. At current growth rates, by early 2020, the bitcoin network will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.   Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Monero that use the POW method also contribute to the problem and this is obviously unsustainable in the long term. PoS mechanisms do not require expensive hardware to do energy intensive calculations to add new blocks to the chain. Instead they aim to achieve distributed consensus whereby the creator of the next block is chosen via various combinations of random selection and network weight & age. This is far more energy efficient as minimal electricity is required to connect the node to the network. 

  Security ?

 With POW consensus there will always be a chance for 51% attacks against the network. A 51% attack refers to an assault on the blockchain by a group of miners controlling more than 50% of the computing power. They would be able to prevent new transactions from gaining confirmations, allowing them to stop payments between some or all users.   They would be able to reverse transactions that were completed while they were in control of the network, meaning they could double-spend coins. Even though this is still a hypothetical situation, it is still far more likely to occur as mining pools grow (Bitmain and their affiliated pools currently contribute 60% of the hashrate - Coindance.com), than a PoS system where the nodes are far more distributed, and the coins are not controlled by a single entity. Another fundamental difference between the two consensus mechanisms lies in the way each handles dishonesty in the network. In POW, if someone tries to cheat when creating a block, their dishonesty is forgiven by the other nodes in the network. In PoS, the dishonesty is penalized instead. Because POW reverts to forgiveness, there’s nothing stopping people from being dishonest.