What is Blockchain ?

Bitcoin is a familiar term and is seen as the beginning of the digital currency era, however what is Blockchain? This was implemented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto known as an anonymous person or group and to-date there are arguments on the personality of behind Satoshi Nakamoto.

Simply Blockchain is the technology on which Bitcoin runs. However the potential of Blockchain extends far beyond digital currency and in this writing you would find out how Blockchain operates, its potential benefits and more importantly its application beyond digital currency.

Therefore Blockchain could be broadly defined as a secure, decentralized and digitalized ledger of transactions recorded in a permanent, efficient and verifiable manner through a network of computers which is shared among the participants of transactions (currently transactions of cryptocurrencies) on real time basis. ‘Blockchain’ originally was known as ‘Block Chain’ where block referred to a record and each time a record is added it collects to the previously generated records like a chain.

The concept of Blockchain is not very different to the functions of the internet or Wikipedia; comparable to Wikipedia there could be many people writing and publishing content which could be viewed by other readers on real time basis. Blockchain similarly enables computation to be conducted and entries be generated by multiple computers within the network which becomes visible by others in the network immediately, this enables the viewing of changes made immediately as oppose to maintaining several copies as edited copy and published copy and the community can control how the information recorded is being accepted similar to Wikipedia.

Additionally a main feature of Blockchain is that operates and stores data across a network of computers facilitating decentralized data processing. Since its implementation in 2009 acceptance of Blockchain has advanced according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council Blockchain holds around 20 Billion Dollars which is around 0.025% of World GDP.

What is Blockchain

However Blockchain will see a drastic surge as increasingly regulators accept the concept. For example recently Wall Street introduced trading of Bitcoin futures and the big four accounting firms conducting testing of Blockchain and moving towards transacting with Bitcoins more interestingly there is a race among the banks and insurance companies as to who would be the early adopter of the ground breaking technology – Blockchain.

Blockchain is the future of information processing and storage for many industries because of the numerous benefits it has brought mainly through its decentralized operating feature. Blockchain is soon becoming popular in other industries such as medical industry, Insurance industry and in industries which require management of data with high level of security of information and transparency.

Among its many benefits firstly because Blockchain operates as a decentralized system it brings in benefits of protection against information theft faced by many industries including the Finance Industry due to centralized information processing and storing as it is vulnerable to hackers of computers, or threat of physical access. In contrast to hack the Blockchain is not possible as security relies on encryption technology.

Secondly Blockchain provides transparency and an inexpensive mechanism for verification of transaction; for the reason that Blockchain process data across many computers which prohibits amendments without the collaboration of all computers or nodes in the network.

Finally Blockchain facilitates completing of transactions with less cost In contrast to the traditional mechanism used within the banking system where within the current system there are number of middle men involved, however Blockchain enables the parties to the transact directly eliminating large portions of transaction cost paid to the middle men in the system. With these benefits of Blockchain the application to other industries will be soon a reality to many industries.