“I’m sure that in 20 years there will either be very large transaction volume or no volume.” Satoshi Nakamoto, founder of Bitcoin

You might have heard this term somewhere – in your Facebook feed, subreddits, online news, or monthly magazines. Or if not, then you’re welcome, because you will firsthand read about it here. Blockchain technology, also known as Blockchain, is a fresh technological breakthrough in terms of online security and history preservation. It is composed of wide, distributed network of computing machines that verify transactions or any kinds of contextual events that happen online. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin (which is supposed to be a joke cryptocurrency but has legitimately increased its value somehow) are all products of Blockchain technology, and just the tip of growing innovation.

Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous identity, created Bitcoin as a digital currecncy experiment in 2009. It was an avenue for secured digital transactions by acting an encrypted digital money, and propagated very well since is launch that its cost once peaked at USD 17,900 for each purchase of one bitcoin (BTC). Then came the thought that this innovation is not just enclosed for digital currencies. It is essentially an incorruptible record of transactions or events in general which happen in real time, they just have to be stored in the whole, synchronized network of machines called the “blockchain”.

As stated earlier, the Blockchain is composed of computing machines. These are called nodes or blocks, and each node has a ledger, which is a record of every transaction that happens inside the blockchain. They are all linked into each other through hashing functions. All transactions then from each node must first undergo verifications through well-designed algorithms, and these algorithms in a nutshell calls the other nodes if they agree on the transaction being processed. If they do, the transaction is now permanently recorded on the ledger of every node. This happens in real time, and many transactions are concurrently being processed every second. The pinnacle of decentralization wherein not a single entity is in charge of the records, but all of them. This is either a trust-less or trustful technology, depends on how you look at it. The only setback is, the processing takes a while and consumes a lot of electrical power.

With the way it works, it can be implemented in promising ways. Cryptocurrency is its peak example. Another would be in the field of medical science, like how medical records of patients are securely stored and kept untampered. It can also be used by different government sectors to record the information of people as how birth certificates, criminal records, passports and the likes are implemented. No one is prone to fraud and if by any chance it is committed, it would not be worth it.

The bottomline is, Blockchain technology is continuously revolutionizing the digital grid. Many institutions are gearing towards this technology and it would not be surprising if we can have a decentralized internet in the near future, but that’s a different topic!