Introduction to Blockchain; What You Need To Understand about the Blockchain

This post will be filled with lots of explanations and defining in order to make it very clear to every user who comes across the post.

This post explains the basic things we have to know about blockchain, the concept of blockchain is very large and cannot be fully described in just one post, but there are simple and necessary things we have to know about the blockchain and they are explained here.

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Let us begin by describing the word blockchain.

A blockchain could be described as a digital ledger that is decentralized, distributed and most times even public, it is used in the recording of transactions across lots of computers in such a way that the records kept on those computer cannot be altered radioactively except subsequent blocks that leads to the actual block has been altered as well.

It is important to note that the blocks described in the definition above, are digital information that are stored in a public data base. The blocks described above, are made up of three digital pieces of information which are:

• Storing of information about transactions which includes date, time as well as transactions carried out.
• Storing of information about who is involved in the transaction.
• Each of these blocks have a way of storing information that distinguishes them from other blocks.

The blockchain is made up of multiple blocks that are strung together. However, for a new block to be added to the blockchain, there are four basic things that must occur and they are:

• A transaction will have to occur.
• The transaction involved has to be verified.
• The transaction involved has to be stored in a block.
• The block where the transaction is stored must be given a hash (A hash is a unique means of identification).

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The Privacy Setting of Blockchain.

Everyone is usually able to view the blocks that have been added to the blockchain. The content of the blockchain is virtually visible to everyone it is also possible for individual users to connect their computers in form of nodes to the blockchain network in order to receive a copy of the blockchain automatically whenever a new block is added.

On the blockchain, hacking is usually a difficult task to perform, for a hacker to hack into a system on the blockchain, the block involved with the transaction hacked will be altered and every single transaction after that will follow suit, so this implies that for every hacking process to be completed successfully without being able to trace where the hacking process is coming from, the hacker must be determined to alter or manipulate every single copy of the blockchain available on the network involved.

Whenever there is a user on the blockchain, it saves the users digital signature or the unique username that the system comes up with.

As mentioned earlier, it is possible for computers to join the blockchain, it is actually not as easy as that, because in order to ascertain that the system can be trusted, the blockchain came up with tests for every computer that want to join and add blocks to the chain.

This test which is called the ‘consensus model’ always require that every computer/user who wants to join the blockchain should be tested and verified.