Student Article
Blockchain: The Newest Superpower
Let’s get started with some simple examples. Imagine if you are able to track the journey of all the ingredients in your food starting from the farm where it was grown to your table. Imagine if you are assured that your vote was counted. How cool and useful that can be! This all is possible with the help of Blockchain Technology. Blockchain is no more a futuristic technology as its already here and many blockchain networks are already in use and making life easy for many people around the globe. It makes things transparent, democratic, decentralized, efficient and most importantly secure. As it is a network, so it is a teamwork. No single institution is the blockchain. It’s all about a group coming together. So, let’s see how it works and what its uses are and how it is changing our world. What is Blockchain Blockchains are basically a chain of blocks that contains information; it is an open and distributed ledger that can be accessed by anyone. This technology first came into picture in 1991, used to timestamp digital documents to make them impossible to backdate or tamper them. Then it was used by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 to develop and secure the digital crypto currency Bitcoin. A blockchain consists of blocks that are linked with its previous blocks and in this way the chain is created. A block consists of three elements. First, is the related information on the subject that the blockchain is build upon like in the case of Bitcoin the information can be about the
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details of a transaction that are the sender’s name, receiver’s name and the amount of coins transferred. Secondly, Hash of the block which is a unique code or called as the finger print of the block and is calculated according to the information added to the block. And thirdly, the Hash of the previous block that helps in creating a chain like structure and also keeps the blockchain secure for example when anyone try to tamper with the existing data of a block, the Hash of that block changes and the link gets broken eventually making all the previous blocks invalid. But still this is not enough for the security as these days computers are so powerful that they can calculate many Hash values and can make the blockchain valid again within seconds by perfectly replacing the new Hash values. So, to make a blockchain more secure there is a mechanism called as 'Proof of Work'. It slows down the creation of a new block. The required time to calculate proof of work in case of Bitcoin is 10 minutes. One more way of keeping it secure is that as it is open to all the members(nodes) of the Blockchain network, each node has a copy of the Blockchain and keeps a check on the it. And in case of a new block is to be added to the chain, its first validated and authenticated by all the nodes according to the consensus created together by them. So, when you try to successfully tamper the data in a block, to make it valid again you will need to calculate all the new Hash values and proof of work for all the following blocks and take control of more than 50% of the network, which is almost impossible to do. Here all the nodes have control but none of them are exclusively in control of the Blockchain. Here a peer-to-peer network is present rather than a centrally managed network system. Changing the World Blockchain can be used in many ways such as for storing Medical records, E-notary, Collecting Taxes, storing patents and discoveries according to their timeline to avoid controversies, to secure your user id and passwords more efficiently and can prevent over-information and the list goes on. So now let’s see how it’s changing our
