Techstein

Have you ever thought that if the taxes you pay to the government are really being spent on your welfare? Have you ever felt the need to track that money ? Well, blockchain technology does just that. While many prople know blockchain as the technology behind cryptocurrency or “A decentralized public ledger”, its capabilities are much more than that.

Blockchain Technology was first defined in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W Scott Stornetta as a Cryptographically secured chain of blocks. Later in 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” establishing the first working model of Blockchain Technology.

The sole purpose of creating blockchain was to timestamp digital documents so that they can not be tempered. It works like a traditional notary or ledger in which once some data is stored it becomes very hard to alter due to its architecture. Talking about the strucute of a “Block” each of which contains some data, the hash (a unique and arbitrary combination of numbers,letters and special characters which require deciphering to extract valuable infromation) of the block and the hash of the previous block. Making even the the slightest change in the data will result in a complete change in the hash code. The data stored inside the block depends upon the environment or setup in which the blockchain is being used. The third component is the hash of the previous block which creates the structure of a virtual chain between the block. If you temper one block the hash of that block changes but the next block still has the previous hash reference, this causes a “Chain” reaction making the whole chain invalid.

Instead of using a centralized entity to manage the chain, Blockchain uses a P2P(Peer-to-Peer) Network. Which means when someone creates a block they get a copy of the whole blockchain, similarly everyone in the network gets informed about a new block and they can verify it to make sure that the block is not tempered or suspicious. Thus the process of adding a block can take some time depending on the size of the blockchain .

Sharing of data in a blockchain is not private, i.e. if members in a chain make a transaction or share some information between themselves, everyone in the network can view it, thus minimizing the possibility of theft or security breach.

Ignored in its early stages, People are now starting to recognize the advantages of using Blockchain Technology to ensure security and reliabality in thier buisness as well as in the government sector. Spreading to nearly every major industry from health care to agriculture, the Worldwide spending on blockchain solutions is expected to grow from 1.5 billion in 2018 to an estimated 15.9 billion by 2023. making it the technology behind on of the fastest growing companies.