Why Blockchain ?
As Governments and businesses are increasingly becoming digital, the need for trust, data integrity and verifiability have become a Imperative. Blockchain is promising due to its features of consensus driven distributed ledger maintained by a distributed network of computing systems.
This has created an exciting possibility of Immutability and Authenticity enabling transactions in trustless business scenarios and new business models.
Blockchain promises to upend the current top-down information systems in our world. Currently, most users of the internet surrender their personal data to centralized databases and services.
To achieve this paradigm shift, blockchain relies fundamentally on two fields of computer science: Distributed Computing and Cryptography.
This paradigm shift requires changes from the developer and the user.
While there’s enormous promise with blockchain development, it requires an awareness of the paradigm shift and an expertise in the fundamental concepts underpinning it. Otherwise, we are inevitably going to recreate the same, centralized monolith we have today.
What is Blockchain ?
Blockchain is a Distributed Ledger governed by a peer to peer network.
In simple terms, it’s a distributed database which is accessible and visible to all stakeholders involved to have a trusted and transparent data sharing and information symmetry.
Just as today’s internet lets us freely share information, blockchain lets us freely share value.
How Distributed Ledger works ?
Is a collection of data with no centralized administrator that has been agreed the point to by consensus. We can see with example , This was believed that during 500 ad in Africa’s one of the island (island name not known- so we can call that as Z) people in Z island used very unique form of currency called RAI stone.
Each of these stones weighed around 200 kilos, making them difficult to move. To exchange them as money for goods or services, they divided the stones in to sections and then, they would announce to every adult on the island who owned what part of each stone.
Each adult had to keep a mental ledger of ownership. Every time any person conducted a trade, an announcement was made to the entire community.
Each member of the community would then update their mental ledger.
In today’s description, this would be called distributed ledger.
All Rai stone ownership was known to everyone, and that knowledge was updated whenever a transaction was made.
So why didn’t just one member of the community keep track of the Rai stones ?
What if that main record keeper was sick, unable to do their job, or was found to be dishonest ? If the only copy of the ledger was changed by any means , wealth would be lost or gained unfairly. The community knew their distributed ledger system safeguarded it from tampering.
Since all the members knew who owned what , it would be very difficult to fool everyone on the island.
Even if one member moved away, the community still had multiple copies of their mental ledger. In this regard, the ledger was fault tolerant and could not be easily changed, corrupted or lost. The members also decided that stones didn’t have to be on the island to hold value. One day, a stone fell into the ocean and the member decided that this stone even though it could not be seen still held value and could still be traded.
This system of consensus by the majority of the adults on the island with no central administrator is one of the first examples of distributed ledger.