Why Blockchain?
Humans are subjective in their judgement/recording of facts and as such, the society can't trust humans to keep 100% accurate records. Also, humans are naturally selected to be self-interested, biased and manipulative.
All these and more make the quest for a way to keep records that are objective and immune to human bias a very highly prioritizes one, and the answer has been seen to be embodied in blockchain technology with the main aim being to remove humans from the equation altogether and replace them with math.
This brings us to various definitions of Blockchain and it's concepts which we will be taking a look at.
- The blockchain is a decentralised ledger or digital list of who owns what in a network. This can be anything at all, thus making the applications of the blockchain limitless.
- Decentralised means every user in the network has an up-to-date copy of the ledger. This makes the records unchangeable. If someone for instance tampers with the ledger, the rest of the network will reject it. It's important to note that this has been the original vision for the internet from the beginning.
- New records (blocks, thus the name "blockchain") encrypted with cryptography. Cryptography is impossibly complicated math that takes a lot of computing power.
- This computing power is provided by "miners" who get paid in cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin) for securing the ledger. This makes the cryptocurrency scarce thereby giving it economic value.
PS: This is the beginning of a series of articles I will be publishing around Blockchain technologies, enjoy! :)