Category: 3. What is a Blockchain

You should now have a basic understanding of how blockchain technology does work in the wild and why they are such a revolutionary idea. Blockchains are a radical new way of producing trust in the digital age without the need for a central authority.  To understand the impact blockchains could one day have, it may… Continue reading Blockchains and the Future

As we have already seen in our discussions around ‘sound money,’ the Bitcoin blockchain sacrifices scalability for security and decentralisation.  In contrast, centralised and secure systems such as Visa can process tens of thousands of transactions per second, but suffer from the double-spend and trust issue; proof of work functions enable trust without authority but… Continue reading The weakest link 

Now that we’ve got how blockchains work nailed down, let us look at some different blockchain technology applications.  The most famous application, and what the technology was initially invented for, is a new form of money free of central control, which we now know as cryptocurrency, the first and most famous example being Bitcoin.  By… Continue reading Blockchain use cases

So we have our cryptographic hash functions that link blocks of data in a chain. We have our proof-of-work mechanism that incentivises new blocks to be added to a chain and helps ensure against bad actors by requiring a computational proof for each block.  The final way that blockchain’s ensure security is by being distributed.  Blockchain’s… Continue reading How is consensus achieved? 

Proof-of-Work is the second half of blockchain technology that, combined with cryptographic hash functions, ensured that the Bitcoin blockchains is secure.  Essentially, proof-of-work is a mechanism that slows down the creation of new blocks by requiring work/effort be exerted before a block is produced. Proof of Work require a mathematical puzzle to be solved or… Continue reading Enter Proof-of-Work 

The innovation of blockchain technology is that by design, blockchains are resistant to retroactive modification and can store data securely without a centralised authority.  The process starts with the cryptographic hash function. Each block has a hash function for its own data and a hash function for the last block’s data.  By encoding the previous… Continue reading Making the chain unbreakable

Each block in a blockchain (barring the genesis block or first block – more on this later) contains three things.  Data to be recorded that is represented by what’s called a cryptographic hash. A coded representation (or cryptographic hash) of the previous block’s data. A timestamp of when the block was added to the chain.  Let’s break… Continue reading Unique characteristics of a blockchain 

In the very first article of this section on cryptocurrency basics we discovered that money was first used to facilitate trade. Facilitating the exchange of goods between two parties that didn’t know or trust each other. As civilisation and commerce have expanded it has been accepted that the only solution to this trust issue at… Continue reading Problem of trust and agency

A blockchain is a new way to store data. Rather than centralising information, and the control over it, in one place (a database), blockchains store it across a network where no one point has the authority to change records, This is called decentralisation.. Blockchain’s record data – in blocks – and securely store this data by… Continue reading What is a Blockchain

What you’ll learn: What is a blockchain? Why trust is a fundamental issue in human relations The characteristics of a blockchain How a blockchain works: consensus &