ArpitGarg's Weblog

Disclaimer: This is an over simplification of blockchain concept. Just for starters.

Since the story of bitcoin has picked up, there is a rousing interest in blockchain technology. I have put together a quick write-up for the novices.

Stop feeling intimidated, block chain is a very simple concept just like the concept of internet. Practical uses of that concept are something that makes blockchain awesome.

What is blockchain?

It is noting but a chain of blocks. Wasn’t that simple! For people having no knowledge of algorithms, consider 10 boxes, each box containing some data, and each box stacked on top of one another. This is blockchain in non-technical term for you. This information can be anything we store in a computer file. Or in terms of bitcoin, can be a digital currency.

If it’s just a chain of information. What’s so unique?

Well, the idea to make the digital information non-duplicable. Consider you have a file on your computer. If you copy and then paste that file, it creates a copy of that file. With blockchain, all information about a particular record is incremental. Which means the size of the file keeps on increasing with every passing second and every passing transaction (grows into a large chain of blocks). And the information is all in public domain visible to millions of people (just like a Wikipedia article). Ever tried putting some bogus information on any Wikipedia page. It gets corrected soon enough by one of millions of users just like you.
Block chain uses a similar logic, keeping data in check.

Use in bitcoin

Bitcoin uses block chain technology. When the digital currency was first visualized, problem was how to stop someone from copy-pasting the digital file. It was solved via blockchain. The information/transaction of a digital currency keeps getting added as a chain to the original file. Over the years bitcoin blockchain size has grown over 100GB in size, with every transaction being verified by millions of users on a distributed network. It still can be corrupted if we copy paste the entire 100GB file, but it’s very difficult due to millions of eyes checking and being in public domain.