What precisely is block chain?

FXEC, Tirunelveli | 05 Aug,2022

Technology is the best when it brings people together. The blockchain era is particularly famous nowadays. What precisely is blockchain? Blockchain is a system that records information in a way that makes it difficult or even impossible to change, cheat or hack the system. It is a digital ledger that is completely open to anyone. Simply, like the name indicates "blockchain is a chain of blocks which stores information”. Each block has three-part - the data part , the hash part, and the hash of previous the block.

Data is nothing but the information which is stored, hash we can compare it to a fingerprint. Whenever a block is created the hash is calculated. This effectively creates a chain of blocks and this technique makes the blockchain which is so secure. So how does this work, let’s say if we tamper with a single block the hash becomes invalid similarly the following block becomes invalid because it no longer stores a valid hash of the previous block. So changing a single block will make the whole bock chain invalid. But using a hash is not enough to prevent tampering because computers these days are very fast and can calculate hundreds and thousands of hashes per second. So we can effectively tamper with a block and recalculate the hashes and make the blockchain invalid again. So to mitigate this blockchain has something called a proof of work mechanism.

This mechanism slows down the creation of the new block. The security of blockchain comes from its creative use of hashing and proof of work mechanisms. There’s one more way blockchain uses to secure themselves and that is being distributed. Instead of using a single entity blockchain uses a peer-to-peer network that allows anyone to join. The creation of blockchain peeked people’s interests and one of the recent development of blockchain is smart contracts. In short, blockchain is originally intended to timestamp digital documents so that it is not possible to backdate them.

Author :

Sasi Keerthana.M

III B.E CSE