Abstract
Like other new generation information technologies such as IoT, big data, AI, and cloud, cryptocurrency and blockchain became buzz words in both industry and academia due to their advantageous features. With the features like decentralization, transparency, immutability, blockchain technology became more famous and is emerging in almost all fields like banking, education, healthcare, government, and real estate. Blockchain technology was introduced in the year 1991. It came into existence after this technology was created for bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency by Santoshi Nakamoto in the year 2008. Since then, the blockchain is evolving rapidly. Even though blockchain usage is in high demand in all the sectors and it has received attention from many international organizations, most of the people lag in knowledge of blockchain technology and Cryptocurrency and how exactly they work. This chapter explores more in detail what blockchain technology is, how it works, and its applications.
TopWhat Is Blockchain?
There is a lot of stuff on blockchain from various sources, such as blogs, Wikipedia, conference proceedings, forum posts, book sand journal articles.There is no particular definition for “what is blockchain?”. It may vary from person to person and source to source, depending on how they analyze the concept. In simple terms Blockchain is “chain of Blocks”. Some people may say “public distributed decentralized ledger”. According to the sources of Wikipedia“. A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed and public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved record cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks” (He, P et al., 2017).
A blockchain is continuous linked list of blocks and each block is called a record, which will keep track of the transaction data, unique hash value, and previous hash value to link with the previous record. Since there is no central node to maintain the records and data is distributed to all the nodes, data protection will be more. If the intruders try to attack or hack the network then they must modify all the copies of data in the blocks, so it is less possible to compute the hash values which will consume huge computation power and attack the blockchain network. Hence it is highly suggestable in financial services.
The blockchain allows transactions which is also known as digital information to be recorded and distributed, but can’t be modified (Junyao Wang, R, 2019). The topic little difficult to bind our heads around without looking at the technology in close. Hence it is important to know why it is actually useful? so let’s have a glance at why the earliest application of blockchain technology came to existence. We can simply represent a block chain as shown in the fig.1.
Figure 1. Sample Blockchain Structure