And Bitcoin is only one public blockchains at the moment. Of course, not just a simple one, but probably the most powerful and influential one. So, Bitcoin deals with cryptocurrency transactions. What do other major blockchains do? The next in line stands Ethereum. Make no confusion with Ether as a cryptocurrency.
Ethereum is an open-source blockchain based distributed operating system and computing platform. It has smart contract functionality. Those who sign up for smart contracts can use Ethereum virtual machine which is decentralized to execute scripts for them on an international network of computers. This number was higher back in March when we had , and a year ago April , there were Apparently, the number has gone down, and the next natural thing to ask is — but why?
The thing is, if one tries explaining why the market goes down, then this person should also have the ability to pinpoint the conditions to change that. A decrease in value. So, we should agree that the whole depreciation of cryptocurrency and the dystopian scenarios for its future are kind of unsupported. Although, the decrease in value caused some of the blockchains to withdraw. The environmental cost of blockchain. Lack of regulation. Bitcoin and other value-based blockchains, as history has shown, are highly volatile.
Scams and market manipulation have occurred because there are no regulatory watchdogs. The legislation apparatus, as always, has been failing to keep pace with smart scammers, so bad cases like Onecoin put thick stains on the common trust even in well-established coins such as Bitcoin, Ether or EOS causing the small fish to simply disappear. So, these were the major reasons for decreased trust and interest in blockchain in the last year which naturally resulted in the slow-down of the number of blockchains going up.
In , the blockchain market experienced a major correction, so blockchain companies now need to get more of universal trust. The challenges that the whole cryptocurrency market faced only showed that most of the blockchain companies needed a strong business skill set to build strong businesses based on their good-looking whitepapers. The blockchain market is still extremely young. The first learning stage has been completed, so the opportunities are getting even more compelling. Since the technology is there, it will be evolving further. The advancement, just like nature, will find the way around natural and artificial barriers over the years to come.
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Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more. What is the difference between someone using a spreadsheet to store information rather than a database? Spreadsheets are designed for one person, or a small group of people, to store and access limited amounts of information. In contrast, a database is designed to house significantly larger amounts of information that can be accessed, filtered, and manipulated quickly and easily by any number of users at once.
Large databases achieve this by housing data on servers that are made of powerful computers. These servers can sometimes be built using hundreds or thousands of computers in order to have the computational power and storage capacity necessary for many users to access the database simultaneously. While a spreadsheet or database may be accessible to any number of people, it is often owned by a business and managed by an appointed individual that has complete control over how it works and the data within it.
So how does a blockchain differ from a database? One key difference between a typical database and a blockchain is the way the data is structured. A blockchain collects information together in groups, also known as blocks, that hold sets of information. A database structures its data into tables whereas a blockchain, like its name implies, structures its data into chunks blocks that are chained together.
This makes it so that all blockchains are databases but not all databases are blockchains. This system also inherently makes an irreversible timeline of data when implemented in a decentralized nature. When a block is filled it is set in stone and becomes a part of this timeline.
Each block in the chain is given an exact timestamp when it is added to the chain. For the purpose of understanding blockchain, it is instructive to view it in the context of how it has been implemented by Bitcoin.
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Like a database, Bitcoin needs a collection of computers to store its blockchain. For Bitcoin, this blockchain is just a specific type of database that stores every Bitcoin transaction ever made.
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Imagine that a company owns a server comprised of 10, computers with a database holding all of its client's account information. This company has a warehouse containing all of these computers under one roof and has full control of each of these computers and all the information contained within them. Similarly, Bitcoin consists of thousands of computers, but each computer or group of computers that hold its blockchain is in a different geographic location and they are all operated by separate individuals or groups of people. However, private, centralized blockchains, where the computers that make up its network are owned and operated by a single entity, do exist.
In a blockchain, each node has a full record of the data that has been stored on the blockchain since its inception. For Bitcoin, the data is the entire history of all Bitcoin transactions.
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If one node has an error in its data it can use the thousands of other nodes as a reference point to correct itself. This way, no one node within the network can alter information held within it. This system helps to establish an exact and transparent order of events.
This ensures that whatever changes do occur are in the best interests of the majority. Each node has its own copy of the chain that gets updated as fresh blocks are confirmed and added. This means that if you wanted to, you could track Bitcoin wherever it goes. For example, exchanges have been hacked in the past where those who held Bitcoin on the exchange lost everything. While the hacker may be entirely anonymous, the Bitcoins that they extracted are easily traceable.
If the Bitcoins that were stolen in some of these hacks were to be moved or spent somewhere, it would be known. Blockchain technology accounts for the issues of security and trust in several ways. First, new blocks are always stored linearly and chronologically. After a block has been added to the end of the blockchain, it is very difficult to go back and alter the contents of the block unless the majority reached a consensus to do so. Hash codes are created by a math function that turns digital information into a string of numbers and letters. If that information is edited in any way, the hash code changes as well.
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If they were to alter their own single copy, it would no longer align with everyone else's copy. When everyone else cross-references their copies against each other, they would see this one copy stand out and that hacker's version of the chain would be cast away as illegitimate.
Such an attack would also require an immense amount of money and resources as they would need to redo all of the blocks because they would now have different timestamps and hash codes. Not only would this be extremely expensive, but it would also likely be fruitless. Doing such a thing would not go unnoticed, as network members would see such drastic alterations to the blockchain.
The network members would then fork off to a new version of the chain that has not been affected. This would cause the attacked version of Bitcoin to plummet in value, making the attack ultimately pointless as the bad actor has control of a worthless asset. The same would occur if the bad actor were to attack the new fork of Bitcoin. It is built this way so that taking part in the network is far more economically incentivized than attacking it. The goal of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed, but not edited.
Blockchain technology was first outlined in by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, two researchers who wanted to implement a system where document timestamps could not be tampered with. The Bitcoin protocol is built on a blockchain.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain... So what does it all mean?
The key thing to understand here is that Bitcoin merely uses blockchain as a means to transparently record a ledger of payments, but blockchain can, in theory, be used to immutably record any number of data points. As discussed above, this could be in the form of transactions, votes in an election, product inventories, state identifications, deeds to homes, and much more.
Currently, there is a vast variety of blockchain-based projects looking to implement blockchain in ways to help society other than just recording transactions. One good example is that of blockchain being used as a way to vote in democratic elections. For example, a voting system could work such that each citizen of a country would be issued a single cryptocurrency or token. Each candidate would then be given a specific wallet address, and the voters would send their token or crypto to whichever candidate's address they wish to vote for.
The transparent and traceable nature of blockchain would eliminate the need for human vote counting as well as the ability of bad actors to tamper with physical ballots. Banks and decentralized blockchains are vastly different.