Block-chain , a near future
The economy of any nation works on contracts, financial transactions, and records of both these. Each system has its own methodology of maintaining these records: these could be manual ledgers which are painstakingly hand written and maintained.
However, up keeping these manual transcriptions is tedious, time consuming, and difficult. It could be erroneous too along with being difficult to refer to for earlier records. Keeping these manual ledgers also takes up a lot of space and efforts to organize them. There are also problems of making corrections in all entries if even one entry is erroneous. Finding the incorrect entry is also a Herculean task in itself.
To keep up with the digitalization happening across the world and also to simply this process of recording contracts and transactions, these hand-written records are being replaced by digital records. These records are nothing but digital ledgers which store huge amount of information and data on the economics of any country or organization. Each digital ledger is called a single block chain.
This financial record can be safely, permanently, and efficiently stored through these digital ledgers. It becomes very easy to find any data at any point of time however old it may be. It records the information systematically as well.
When economic transactions take place across several computers, these digital ledgers can be created to record transactions across these computers. A block chain is a public ledger and is decentralized in nature. There is no central storage room. In a block chain, the data is stored in individual machines of people. These machines are simply connected through technology.
There is no restriction on the number of computers that can be connected in a block chain. The more the number of computers connected, the more is the accuracy of these block chains.
Block Chain also has a digital wallet. It claims to be the easy way to send, receive, store, and trade digital currency without physically changing hands at all. Being a part of this chain also enables the user to keep abreast of all the news, prices, and market information about this digital currency.
All records of transactions on various computers are linked through cryptography. Each block chain has a cryptographic hash of the previous block, transaction data, as well as a time stamp.
Records kept on this cannot be altered singly or in isolation. If any record has to be altered in any computer, you will need to alter in all of the related block chains. The digital information can be distributed to other systems, but cannot be copied. The data cannot be modified, and hence is secure. Changes, if any have to be done on all block and with the consent of the entire network.
The block chain technology is the guiding force behind the digital currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Stellar etc.
Block chain, a near future, can be seen to soon overtake the cloud storage and may even replace the centralized cloud based systems. While for cloud computing one requires a server room, it is not the case for a block chain.Read more...