Into on Blockchain

Satoshi Nakamoto who’s identity is unknown till date, proposed blockchain in the proof-of-work to
solve the Byzantine General’s problem in bitcoin. This was the first successful attempt to implement
a decentralized digital currency with ability to conduct transactions that cannot be reversed without
a trusted and centralized third party. Blockchain is built on concept of decentralization together with
hash-based proof-of-work, public key cryptography, and peer-to-peer network. Despite the fact that
blockchain innovation was created to oversee electronic money without depending on a trusted
third party, this specific idea is being researched and right now used to solve problems in many other
areas. Blockchain can be used in various financial services, smart contracts, public services, Internet
of Things (IoT), reputation systems and security services and others. (H. T. M. Gamage, 2019) 4
Blockchain could be considered as a public ledger where all transactions are stored securely in a list
of blocks. This chain grows as new blocks are added to it continuously. The peers of blockchain
system give consent or reach a common agreement about a particular state or transaction rather
than having a central authority doing it. This is the concept of consensus algorithms. In a nutshell
blockchain is a decentralized system for digital interactions (transactions) based on multiple,
independent yet trusted third parties (nodes) keeping a copy of the transactional ledger and
autonomously confirming the legitimacy of the transaction handled through the network. The
transactions are themselves are put away in a chronologically interconnected chain of data blocks
where each block contains a chronologically added set of transactions. The data itself is stored
among the blockchain however the information’s owner who holds the means to access it digitally
controls the access to this data and the ability to interact with it. At its core, blockchain is the mix of
three technologies; private key cryptography, P2P network and a protocol governing incentivization.
When a new block is made, its contents together with the cryptographic hash of the previous block,
and mostly, a timestamp, are utilized to make another cryptographic hash for the block. This makes
the hash of each block unique and directly reliant on the hash of the previous block in the chain. Any
information altering inside the block will bring about the chain breaking and the tampering will be
visible to all nodes, as the hash chain no longer supports the list held by other nodes. This is done on
its own by every node verifying the validity of all the hashes and transaction validity - a valid chain is
where over half of nodes come to the same hash of the last block. Thus, no single entity controls the
chain. (Zhang, Xue, & Lui, 2019)