What is Blockchain? (I know I am late to the party…)
Seems like we are at the dawn of a new age… With a digital “Big Bang” event beginning with “The Blockchain”! Time for me to get educated on it.
The blockchain and the Crypto markets are things I have been curious about since the original pump and dump of Bitcoin in 2017.
Blockchain technology seems to be all anyone can talk about lately. So, I thought it would be a good idea to get a good foundation on it.
I scoured the web to find all the information I could about blockchain. The information is vast and ranges from a simple paragraph information to a 30 min read on its past, current use cases, etc… There is just so much information out there, but I am going to do my best to summarise it here.
Here goes nothing!
A Brief Explanation of Blockchain.
“Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network.”
The quote above was taken from the IBM site. This is the most concise single sentence explanation that I have come across.
When Was Blockchain Invented? (And a Little History…)
Many people and websites mention blockchain technology in the same breath as Bitcoin, making it easy to assume that both are where invented at the same time or that Bitcoin and Blockchain are interchangeable.
This would be a false assumption.
According to Wikipedia, the cryptographer David Chaum first proposed something that resembled the blockchain protocol in his 1982 dissertation “Computer systems established, maintained and trusted by mutually suspicious groups”.
But the blockchain council states that blockchain first emerged in 1991 from the work of W.Sctott Stornetta and Stuart Haber. Their work was responsible for shaping a cryptographically secured blockchain with immutable timestamps.
In 1992, this was expanded on to incorporate Merkle trees. This allowed several documents certificate to be stored in one block.
Now enter Satoshi Nakamoto…
In 2008 Nakamoto gave rise to the idea of blockchain, improving on the original idea by not requiring a trusted party to sign before timestamping blocks.
The following year Nakamoto implemented his idea as the keystone of Bitcoin. The blockchain serves as a public ledger for all transactions on the network.
The Features of Blockchain
There seem to be several features of blockchain technology that make it attractive.
Decentralisation and Immutability
Blockchain is decentralised through the sharing of all or parts of the blockchain ledger across the participants of the network. The creates an environment where you don’t have to rely on trust, as there is no one trusted party with access to the information. If information in one ledger is corrupted or altered, it is rejected by the majority of members on the group.
This makes the ledger immutable.
Transparency
Due to the decentralised nature of the blockchain, there is no need to request information as every member has a view of the all the “transactions” in real time.
High Availability
Another benefit of being decentralised on a P2P (peer to peer) network is that there is no single point of failure. If one computer goes down on the network the rest will pick up the slack. This would make it highly unlikely for the network to come down entirely. The more members there are the stronger the network.
High Security
There is also an assumption of high security as transactions on the blockchain are cryptographically secure. This places the trust in the cryptographic algorithm rather than a third party. In theory this should provide greater integrity.
My Thoughts
I can see the attraction of blockchain and why it is so lauded as a technology. The summary of my research only touches on the
During my research it was evident that blockchain technology has massive potential.
Blockchain seems to be the underpinnings of a new virtual economy online. Especially in the finance and asset space. There is a plethora of crypto currencies available as well as networks that support them.
NFTs (non fungible tokens) and smart contracts are also on the rise. I’ll have to explore these later. There is so much out there, it’s a little overwhelming and… intimidating.
My aim from here is to dive deeper into all things “crypto” and make some sense of what is happening here. From what I can see there is a lot happening, with a lot of opportunities to get involved especially as this space seems like it is in its infancy.
I have heard the term ‘Crypto Millionaire” thrown around a lot… and that is intriguing in itself! (I am sure the reasons are obvious!).
Let’s see what the future holds…
