Blockchain Technology And How It Works

If you have been living anywhere but in Antartica or under the rock for the past year (and surprisingly surviving,) then you most definitely have heard of blockchain technology at least once in your life. An innovation so great and bizarre, sometimes described as the next greatest invention after the internet, blockchain technology broke the web when it surfaced at the beginning of the year.

What is blockchain?

There are several definitions one can give to blockchain as a term. The most popular ones being the following:

a) Don and Alex Tapscott, authors of Blockchain Revolution, describe blockchain as, “an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions, but virtually everything else.”

b) Steve Wilson of ZD Net described it as, “an algorithm and distributed data structure for managing electronic cash without a central administrator among people who know nothing about one another. Originally designed for the crypto-currency Bitcoin, the blockchain architecture was driven by a radical rejection of at (government-guaranteed) money and bank controlled payments.”

Complex to the very core, the only thing that comes out clearly from these definitions is that blockchain basically consists of digital ledger technology, which lets transactions be broken into individual ones. In simple words, blockchain is like your very own personal ledger which cannot be broken or looked into! You know like when you have a diary that keeps being read by other people? The creators of blockchain made this technology what it is today because it is protected by a unique distributed network.

What is the unique distributed network?

The creators of blockchain realised very early on that only having a strong sense of control was not enough to protect this new creation. They had to have backups (with backups for the backups) for when things go wrong, so that anonymity and information is not only protected, but secured as well.

Simply put, if you have digital money, you need a wallet. Unlike specific wallets like Paytm, blockchain technology is the publicly accessible digital wallet with unique individual identifiers. People who want to make transactions via blockchain need to send messages and in order to send these messages, the users need keys. To make sure no one else has access to these keys, the technology needs security, which comes in the form of cryptographic keys. These cryptographic keys are made by keygens, which use complex mathematical equations to ensure complete security. Thereby, through this process, blockchain is made extremely secure.

When I first heard the word blockchain, I did not really understand what it meant. There was so much ambiguity in the term for me that I had to do a lot of digging up and understanding! Hope this helped clear the air for you as well!