How Can Blockchain Technology Be Used
In this current day and age, where every innovation demonstrates unprecedented potential, I still can’t help but be astonished by Blockchain technology’s incredible potential. As both a development platform and a cryptocurrency system, the options are just as limited as the human spirit of innovation. Unfortunately, the knowledge we have about Blockchain technology tends to be scattered, incoherent, or just plain obsolete. I’ve written this article to help you realize the theory of Blockchain as well as fundamental protocols.
First, in Section 1, I’ll describe the background of value storage systems and outline what’s wrong with banks serving as the central authority for maintaining value transactions. In Section 2 we’ll take a look at Blockchain philosophy as a cryptocurrency system, as well as a development platform. Finally, Section 3 sheds some light on the main element principles of Blockchain technology, the working process, and the current developmental phases.
1. Background
These days, with easy access to WIFI and smartphones at our fingertips, it’s easy to consider the internet for granted. But before you can understand the incredible technology of Blockchain, it’s important to grasp a few basic concepts. The internet is a network of information through which data moves in one node to another. A node is a connection point that can receive, store, or send data, and each node reproduces and stores data infinitely.
Information on the internet spreads quickly and in a non-unique fashion. Some information shared commercially is not free, but value-driven. For instance, a publisher might sell copies of a book but keep the master copy. In this example, information is transmitted through reproduction. But what goes on when you’re transmitting value? In case you have a hundred British pounds (£100), you cannot sell copies in the same manner as a book’s publisher, because it would be valueless. Therefore, value has to be transported through a “move” format and not a “copy” format to avoid duplication. For many years experts have prevented double spending by maintaining ordered ledgers of transactions.
We don’t often take the time to consider that financial transactions generally consist of a date, time, sender, a receiver and an amount. Each person’s stake is dependant on adding incoming amounts and subtracting outgoing amounts. Hence, the two significant methods for keeping track of value transfers are cash notes (physically passing money in one hand to another) and ledgers. However, printing notes and securing against reproduction is quite challenging and involves a comparatively great amount of value. Plus, if you tear a note by 50 percent it’s suddenly worth nothing.
Which leaves us with ledgers. When carefully protected, ledgers can keep a record of value in a very resilient fashion. However, they require careful attention to detail and a great amount of trust. All parties active in the transaction need to be sure that the person updating the records is both efficient and reliable. This implies that the security of a ledger has its costs and risks. With the digital revolution, the days of tracking long columns of information by hand have passed away. The main method of tracking value, a digitized ledger, involves the same unique transaction details (dates, amount, sender, and receiver) as a physical ledger. For example, when you open a brand new bank account, you’re assigned an account number. This identifies your transactions on a digital ledger. Every bank in the world maintains a distinctive, synchronous ledger so your value is tracked across exclusive storage locations.
Unfortunately, the banking system itself is inherently risky. The machine relies on a set of centralized databases that store worldwide financial transactions. Instead of trusting the folks in charge of updating physical ledgers, consumers are forced to trust the banks themselves for consistency, integrity and transactional security.
2. The Problem with Banks
Giving banks full control of global financial ledgers creates huge financial risks. As financial rule makers, banks are prone to toe the line and also twist reality. They often times create value out of “thin air”, relying on the fact that they’re viewed as being “trustworthy”.
Let’s consider this scenario: a bank lends money to Customer A. The transaction is put into their ledger: “Amount X has been added to Customer A, and after a certain amount of time Amount X, plus Amount Y (interest) is expected from Customer A”. This seems fairly straightforward in the abstract, however in reality, Amount X may not exist before the transaction is documented. How is it possible for banks to produce value from thin air? Through debt! Legally, banks can lend additional money than they own, provided they’ve safeguarded their risks. As a result, a lender pays non-payment insurance in addition to interest levels. This helps to ensure that interest rates are proportional to the potential risks taken by banks.
The problem with this system? When people take advantage of limitless money power but are unable to repay their loans, it leads to global disaster. In nov 2008, the collapse of the financial sector led to the bankruptcy of countless organisations.
3. Blockchain Philosophy
In the fall of November 2008, an author with the pseudonym “Sakoshi Nakamoto” suggested the need for a brand new kind of money system - Bitcoin. Nakamoto proposed Bitcoin to create and store value in a totally different digital form - fully decentralized. Recall that in conventional banking systems, value is stored in centralized ledgers and maintained solely by banks. But in a decentralized ledger system, everyone linked to the machine can initiate new transactions and form a consensus to validate transactions. This advancement was the response to decades of expert research. Suddenly, the challenge of decentralizing value transactions on a massive scale seemed truly possible. Bitcoin successfully recreated a decentralized digital money system and inspired new ideas of other generic value mediums, including plans, certificates of ownership and many more. By creating more cases of value decentralization, the “internet of value” was created.
3.1 Blockchain Real World Applications
Though the Bitcoin platform is the most popular application of Blockchain technology, the potential of a Blockchain extends far beyond financial transactions. We are able to apply currency tracking concepts to other real-world applications, such as property title ownership. Let’s consider it this way: when Person A sells his/her property to Person B, Person B sends the value of the house in currency to Person A. In addition, Person A sends the ownership title or certificate to Person B. Such ownership titles can be registered with a central authority, where the record of the transaction is stored in a digital ledger.
Let’s consider another example. When you operate a movie theatre, you can keep a strict record of all tickets you generate. You can decide the value of every movie ticket and track the creation, movement and destruction of these tickets in a ledger. In the Blockchain world, this procedure is called tokenization. It gives you to track value apart from just currency. To understand this further, I will describe the concept of transactions in section 3.2.
3.2 The Concept of Transactions
Transactions consist of four basic elements: origin, destination, value, and state. Consider Figure 1, which demonstrates the logic for a simple transaction. If the sender’s balance at the date of the transaction is more than the transaction value, then the sender’s balance is decreased by the transaction value, and the receiver’s balance is increased by the same amount. In other words, you can only give up to the amount you have.
On the Bitcoin platform, the essential logic is the same for all those transactions in the ledger. These programs can be customized with the addition of new variables, functions, and even more sophisticated constructs such as loops to allow the execution of varied transaction types on a Blockchain. Moreover, structures like mortgage payment plans, insurance contracts, movie tickets, lottery tickets and energy tokens can be modelled. In the world of Blockchain, they are called smart contracts.
Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are programs stored on a Blockchain. The functions of the programs are executed through transactions. Smart contracts include things of value such as copyrights for artists, contract for lawyers, laws in Congress, votes in polls, invoices for an accountant, bets in a lottery game, maintenance procedures in a factory, procedures in a supply chain, shares in a business and so many more. The transaction sizes may vary in terms of memory and computer processing power.
4. What is a Blockchain?
A Blockchain is a digital record of valuable transactions beyond your control of a central authority. It uses codes that run on the computing devices of all individuals involved in the transaction. Of course, in a Blockchain free-world, a trusted party needs to look after all the centralized transactions and keep maintaining consistent and genuine ledgers.
There are three layers to every Blockchain concept:
1. Design goals: the properties a Blockchain software possesses such as distribution, decentralization, immutability, and peer-to-peer.
2. Implementation: A Blockchain’s developer can implement some or all the aforementioned properties. Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of Blockchain implementations.
3. Instances: different networks focusing on different datasets permit you to build a different version of reality. For example, the Ethereum implementation has at least four public cases of its protocol: Rinkeby, Robsten, Kovan and the Main Ethereum network. You’re also able to create private instances for development purposes using platforms such as Remix and TestRPC.
Distributed and Centralized System: In cases like this, all nodes in the network store “read only‟ copies of the info, but modification happens at one centralized node. Consider Napster’s peer-to-peer file sharing system. Files were distributed across networks, allowing users to download content, but the list of the files, their locations and business logic, were centralized.
Distributed and Decentralized System: When data can be distributed and decentralized concurrently, it’s impossible to corrupt or hack the network. However, the challenge of implementing a distributed and decentralized data system lies in maintaining consistency. Blockchain manages this consistency issue through an idea known as the consensus algorithm. Counting on leading edge research, Blockchain uses cryptoeconomics and game theory to make this possible.
The Bitcoin Implementation
Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyper Ledger fabric are good examples of the implementation of Blockchain. Like flavours of ice cream, they share the same base but appeal to different audiences. Bitcoin is implemented in a completely non-trusting environment. It really is a specialized Blockchain because it is mainly made for one application: a digital cash system. The basic element that transactions track is named unspent transaction output.
The Ethereum Implementation
Ethereum is a Blockchain implementation that depends on the same principles as Bitcoin with extra features that help it to to operate in a slightly different way. For example, with Ethereum there are no unspent transaction outputs because the Blockchain has a stored state allowing it to store the balance of each account after each block. Due to the various implementation strategy of the consensus algorithm, enough time used to make new “blocks‟ in Bitcoin is 10 minutes while Ethereum is a mere 7 seconds.
Ethereum clients or nodes connect to peers through a protocol Lina known as DEVp2p. In DEVp2p the customer performs functions such as getting data, validating data, and writing data to the neighborhood database (LevelDB) and sends data to any requesting peers. The client also receives transactions and propagates them to the network, which executes the smart contract functions. Decentralized applications (also known as Dapps (e.g. wallets and Explorers)) connect to the Ethereum network by way of an Ethereum node or client. A JavaScript console can be attached to a running node for invoking web3 APIs. The main element benefit of this technology? Speed! These transactions boast unprecedented efficiency.