Why Blockchain Is Going To Be The Next Big Enabler

The advantages of a decentralised system of authentication are huge.

- Abhijit Dey

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know or must have heard about bit coins. For the uninitiated, Bit coin is a cryptocurrency that has its own payment system. In 2008, an unidentified person who went with the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, presented a white paper titled “Bit coin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. Based on a peerto-peer network system and distributed time stamping server, it removes the necessity of a financial institution or a trusted authority to authorise payments. After releasing the first Bit coin software in early 2009, Satoshi open sourced the software later in the year. We won’t be going into detail about what Bit coin or cryptocurrencies are, but rather focus on the technology behind Bit coin – Blockchain.

What is a Blockchain?

Blockchain is fundamentally a database system with some differences. In a traditional database, the data is stored on a central server which is trusted to maintain the centralised database. Whereas in a blockchain, the database is decentralised so that the burden of trust isn’t upon one server, but instead on a network of systems. Such a model takes the help of numerous computers or nodes, each managing a copy of the same database.

How does a blockchain work?