Blockchain technology: living in a decentralized everything

In the last months, there has been a growing interest about blockchain technology, the open and distributed ledger that is at the heart of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This technology is based on a peer-to-peer network that allows storing any type of transaction in a verifiable and trustworthy way.However, the most important feature of blockchain is that its distributed nature makes any type of centralized control authority superfluous: each transaction is monitored and approved by all the users within the ledger, which ensures the fairness of the process and also guarantees that the data cannot be traced back to an individual (anonymization).The self-sustainability of this process is based on “mining”, a review process performed on each block of data in a blockchain that is rewarded by means of “tokens” or cryptocurrencies. In other words, the “miners” are incentivized to solve the complex computational problems required for validating the next block of transactions (hence th e term “blockchain”) and keeping the system protected. About a decade ago, blockchain technology was first outlined in a brilliant white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto (which is a pseudonym for the author whose identity is currently unknown) as a way to exchange and store Bitcoins - the first cryptocurrency.However, it was then soon realized that the potential of this distributed architecture could go far beyond the use of virtual money.A...
Source: Positive Technology Journal - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs