As with so many other things that are in vogue, the term Blockchain has been heard a lot lately, sometimes referring to electronic cryptocurrencies and sometimes referring to reliably stamping signatures on electronic documents. But what does it really consist of?
The Blockchain (blockchain, in English) comprises a distributed database , where each item has a time record and a link to a previous document , so that once sealed it is theoretically impossible to modify it.
Therefore, due to the great security , reliability and verifiability that it provides, Blockchain is used in this type of application, which require high reliability so that falsification does not occur.
Time stamping on the operation (called transaction in Blockchain slang) allows blockchains to store information that interests us to perform a temporary follow-up for some reason.
An example of this would be a contract that must be renegotiated annually and therefore varies once every twelve months.
Being a distributed database, the items are replicable on different computers
This makes each of the data on several servers or computers and its synchronization occur almost simultaneously, it is very difficult to spoof them all at once and to be achieved with one of the registers, so it would be easy to detect the error and avoid it. spread.
This happens when an authorized modification is performed, it is very easy to validate the authorization and modify all records simultaneously.
Another interesting feature of the Blockchain is that the information is not erased; when it comes to modifications, they are carried out through addition
In other words, the only operation to be performed is the addition of data, so the Blockchain stores the entire history of the document or item and the modifications applied to it.
It is a relatively modern concept, which was invented in 2009 to be used in the famous cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
The purpose of this construction was to check the transactions so that they could not be modified later, for example, to add a zero behind some of the ciphers…
In the most adequate, simple and brief way to define the Blockchain, it is like a “scribe” who attests the operations in such a way that it is impossible to modify the result afterwards.
In addition, by having all the transaction history available, we can reconstruct it to detect any problems that may arise that do not fit the accounts.
Another use given is the signing of contracts.
Each of the parties can stamp their digital signature and the entire operation is stored in a block of the chain, which the contract signed attests to. As explained earlier, it can also store contracts that renew with the time changes need to be made.
Blockchains can be public or private.
How can we intuit, the public can be consulted by any person , while private have restricted access to a limited number of persons or entities.
Can also be classified with or without permission-
In the first case, with permission, not all entities that have access to the blockchain can carry out transactions, while in the second (without permission), any entity that participated in the Blockchain can carry out transactions.
