We have been living in times where it is difficult to track the source of any information and also while any information is being circulated, chances are that it could be tampered upon. Ever wondered if one wants to sell a piece of land and the buyer wants to know the details of its first owner and identify how many times that piece of land was sold?
Well, it was extremely difficult until a decade ago. Technology, architecture and design pattern underwent major overhaul to address such complex challenges with minute nitty-gritties.
Introducing the cutting edge solution for such complex problem – The BlockChain. A really interesting concept of decentralizing data storage policy while keeping the security of the same intact.
How the concept of “Blockchain” was coined remains a mystery as some say it was created by group of people and others say that it was the brain child of one genius. Whoever created, we are happy to be benefited from it.
The name “blockchain” has been carefully coined and its meaning is simple and straight forward.
You have information that you put into a “block” and you have series of such blocks connected with each other as a chain. One can go ahead and add information and this information will be added to the chain as a “Block”. If anyone wants to modify content of a block, even then a new block gets created, thereby it prevents one from hampering the older blocks.
Though the technology is new, but the concept of recording, maintaining of information is not new. Since centuries, we have been maintaining information in record books commonly and usually referred as a “ledger”. However, this manual “ledger” had its own share of flaws as we did not have the right resources to keep a track of previous entries.
The same “ledger” concept has been extended and adopted for the new technology.
This very “ledger” unlike the traditional “ledger” is distributed and a decentralized ledger and is available on public network and is also known as the “Hyper ledger”. What is interesting to note here is that even though it is there on public network, it does not give the room for hacking or tampering of information.
How blockchain actually works?
The working of blockchain is fairly simple.
- All transactions will be treated as “information”.
- Each information is recorded and treated as a “block”.
- This block can also be known as “blockchain wallet”.
- Before this block is created, it is validated by network of computers.
- Once it is validated and verified, this block of information is attached to the chain.
However, the internals of this architecture is extremely complex and long.
- If someone wants to make modifications to the block others have added to the chain, he will have to traverse all the way to the starting of the chain and initiate the change for each block.
- This obviously is time taking and very complex, because one cannot modify an existing node, the modified content for the given node will be treated as a new block and again the entire process of validation, verification and attaching starts in the chain.
This internal architecture ensures that information on the block is impenetrable.
Blockchain was initially applied with crypto currencies, however, looking at its innate nature, researchers worldwide started looking out for problems where blockchain technology can be incorporated as the backbone to the solution.
Various governments have come forward to embrace this amazing technology to address land registrations. Blockchain is proving out to be the one stop solution for domains such as Logistics, FMCG Goods, Life Sciences and many more.
In coming days, it is expected that lot of research will be carried out with blockchain to see its deep impact in various domains, industries.
