What Is Blockchain and What Are Its Advantages

Blockchain has become a hot topic in recent years and you can hear or read about blockchain news almost every day. But a lot of people still don't understand blockchain. In this article, we will talk briefly about this new technology.

What Is Blockchain?

Blockchain is essentially a decentralized database of decentralized accounts and it is the underlying technology for Bitcoin. Blockchain itself is actually a string of data associated with the use of cryptography generated data blocks, and each data block contains a number of bits of currency network transactions.

Whenever an encrypted transaction occurs, Miners, or people with powerful computing power on the network, begin to use algorithmic decryption to verify transactions and create new blocks to keep track of the latest transactions. The new blocks are added linearly in chronological order to the end of the original blockchain, and the book is kept growing and extending.

Through the complex public key and private key settings, the blockchain network broadcasts new transactions to the entire financial network in real time, and the transactions are recorded and distributed to each client. There is someone else's transaction record in the ledger as well, although you can only see the value and the corresponding transaction address (basically this is a lengthy sequence of letters and numbers). This way you can't know the true identify of the persons behind the transactions. 

2 The Advantages of the Blockchain Technology

(1) Distributed decentralization: Each node and each miner on the blockchain must follow the same transaction rule, which is based on cryptographic algorithms rather than credits, and each transaction requires approval from other users within the network, So there is no need for a third-party intermediary structure or endorsement of the trust institution.

In a traditional decentralized network, an effective attack on a central node (for example, a payment mediator) can destroy the entire system, while in a decentralized network, such as a blockchain, attacking a single node can't control or destroy the entire network.

(2) Trustless System: on the blockchain network, by means of algorithm of self-restraint, any malicious behavior will be rejected by nodes on the network. Therefore, the Blockchain system does not rely on the central authority support and credit endorsement .

In the traditional credit endorsement network system, the participants need to trust the central organization. As the number of participants increases, the security of the system decreases. Contrary to the traditional case, the participants in a block-chain network do not need to trust anybody, but as the number of participating nodes increases, the security of the system increases, and the data content can be made completely public.

(3) Data Persistancy: Blockchain technology uses a one-way hash algorithm, and each new block must follow the rule of adding new data. Each block also contains information about its previous block, making data modification almost impossible. You can think that financial records on a blockchain are permanent. They cannot be changed and cannot be deleted.

I hope you have a better understanding about blockchain now. You can follow news about blockchain to follow its development. Blockchain is here to change the world!