An Introduction to the Blockchain Technology for the Beginners

These days, technology is scaling newer heights of success at an unbelievably fast pace. One of the latest triumphs in this direction may be the evolution of the Blockchain technology. The new technology has greatly influenced the finance sector. In fact, it had been initially developed for Bitcoin – the digital currency. But now, it finds its application in several other things as well.

Sounding Bitcoin Era was probably easy. But, one is yet to learn what is Blockchain?

A distributed database

Imagine an electronic spreadsheet, which is copied umpteen amount of times across some type of computer network. Now, imagine the computer network is designed so smartly that it regularly updates the spreadsheet alone. This is a broad summary of the Blockchain. Blockchain holds information as a shared database. Moreover, this database gets reconciled continuously.

This approach has its own benefits. It does not allow the database to be stored at any single location. The records in it possess genuine public attribute and may be verified quickly. As there’s no centralised version of the records, unauthorised users have no methods to manipulate with and corrupt the info. The Blockchain distributed database is simultaneously hosted by millions of computers, making the data easy to get at to almost anyone over the virtual web.

To make the concept or the technology clearer, this can be a good idea to discuss the Google Docs analogy.

Google Docs analogy for Blockchain

After the advent of the e-mail, the conventional method of sharing documents would be to send a Microsoft Word doc as attachment to a recipient or recipients. The recipients will take their sweet time to proceed through it, before they send back the revised copy. In this process, one must wait till receiving the return copy to start to see the changes designed to the document. This happens because the sender is locked from making corrections till the recipient is done with the editing and sends the document back. Contemporary databases don’t allow two owners access the same record as well. This is one way banks maintain balances of these clients or account-holders.

In contrast to the set practice, Google docs allow both the parties to access exactly the same document as well. Moreover, it also allows to view an individual version of the document to both of them simultaneously. As being a shared ledger, the Google Docs also acts as a shared document. The distributed part only becomes relevant once the sharing involves multiple users. The Blockchain technology is, in a way, an extension of this concept. However, it is very important point out here that the Blockchain isn’t meant to share documents. Rather, it is just an analogy, which will help to have clear-cut idea about this cutting-edge technology.

Salient Blockchain features

Blockchain stores blocks of information across the network, that are identical. By virtue of this feature:

The data or information can’t be controlled by any single, particular entity.
There can’t be no single failure point either.
The info is hold in a public network, which ensures absolute transparency in the overall procedure.
The data stored inside it cannot be corrupted.
Demand for Blockchain developers

As mentioned earlier, Blockchain technology includes a very high application in the world of finance and banking. Based on the World Bank, more than US$ 430 billion money transfers were sent through it only in 2015. Thus, Blockchain developers have significant demand in the market.

The Blockchain eliminates the payoff of the middlemen in such monetary transactions. It had been the invention of the GUI (Graphical User Interface), which facilitated the common man to gain access to computers in form of desktops. Similarly, the wallet application is the most common GUI for the Blockchain technology. Users make use of the wallet to buy things they want using Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.