Blockchain: A Disruptive Technology

Technology

A Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger that records the transaction in ‘Blocks’. A set of transactions are stored in the Block which contains a link to the previous Block, consequently, a chain of sequentially ordered Blocks is formed (Mayes, Jayasinghe & Markantonakis, 2014). A distributed ledger is the core of Blockchain through which data can be inserted and amended using the nodes’ Consensus mechanism in the network. Every collaborating node in a Blockchain contains a copy of the entire records in a sequence of the interconnected system (Valduriez & Ozsu, 2011). In a Blockchain, the cryptographic hash function is used to link sequential Blocks together in such a way that, any modification of transaction data in a Block would alter the hash value of the following Block and consequently this alteration process goes on for the rest of the subsequent Blocks in the chain. This mechanism introduces easily noticeable discrepancies in the event of any slightest alteration to the Blockchain (Ferretti, D’Angelo & Marzolla, 2018). In order to provide a reasonable level of anonymity, Blockchain utilises digital pseudonyms which are hashed public keys. This pseudonym can be used to trace the actions of an individual. However, correlating a pseudonym to an exact individual is resource-intensive (Zhu et al., 2016).