The way I understand the Blockchain
Blockchain - The biggest financial revolution of the decade.
Let us assume that there are two people raghava and rakesh . raghava borrows some money from rakesh and rakesh writes it on a piece of paper signed by raghava. After some days raghava denies the existence of such document and claims that rakesh has forged that piece of paper. rakesh would now find it difficult to prove that raghava actually owes him Money.
In this example, rakesh and raghava are two nodes.
Now assume the same scenario, but among a society. So there is ’k’ pair of people transacting with each other. And the only proof that each pair has, is that piece of paper. Looking at this scenario, one person, gayathri comes up with a solution. She suggests maintaining a common notebook of the transaction for the entire society. She designates town hall to be the place where every exchange takes place. In the common notebook, every pair writes the transaction and then the notebook is kept safely. People rejoice and accept gayathri as their leader.
That notebook can be called a database.But one day, somebody spills wine on the notebook. This makes the notebook illegible. Taking the advantage of this situation, raghava again denies taking money from rakesh.
This is the problem databases face - a single point of failure.
Irritated by this problem, gayathri comes up with another solution. She suggests maintaining multiple notebooks. She chooses some trustworthy people from the society and gives them a notebook each. Now every time a transaction or exchange takes place between two people, gayathri instructs some of those trustworthy people to mention the transaction in their notebooks. So the data is repeated in the notebooks. Now, even if one notebook is destroyed, chances are that all the data regarding transactions are still present in the combination of other notebooks.
This is a distributed database and multiple notebooks are the multiple nodes.
But next day, another problem arises. gayathri has a friend named Raju who owes a lot of money to some people in the society. He asks gayathri for help and she agrees to help him. She instructs all the people with the notebooks to remove the entries where Raju received money. Now Raju doesn’t owe any money based on the notebooks. Here,comes the technological solution.. The Blockchain
But next day, another problem arises. gayathri has a friend named Raju who owes a lot of money to some people in the society. He asks gayathri for help and she agrees to help him. She instructs all the people with the notebooks to remove the entries where Raju received money. Now Raju doesn’t owe any money based on the notebooks. Here,comes the technological solution.. The Blockchain
This is the problem with distributed databases - they are centralized. That means one single entity owns all the nodes/resources and can make changes as they deem fit.
When the people from the society come to know of it, they remove gayathri from the leadership.
- They decide to keep a notebook each. Every time a transaction is made between any two people, all the people from the town come together and mention it in their respective notebooks. So if there are n people in the society, then there are n notebooks and no one person controls the overall representation of the transactions.This is decentralization.
- They also decide to never remove or delete an already mentioned transaction from the notebook. This is immutability.
- A very enthusiastic anitha , gayathri's mom suggested that the transactions form a chain, so they decided to call the collective set of fully replicated, decentralized, immutable notebooks as Blockchain.
-The Blockchain is a decentralized, peer to peer, immutable storage network which is censor free and regulator free because of -the absence of one single controlling entity. Every transaction that is written is voted upon by a majority of nodes and changing something which was written before in the chain is computationally very difficult.
- Pasupunoori.Raghava
The tech savvy..........
