Blockchain Explained: How It Works, Who Cares and What Its Future May Hold

[Julio Franco]

Best known as the immutable database that runs underneath cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is poised to play a critical role in every industry imaginable as businesses seek ways to cash in on the distributed ledger technology's promise of enabling a "trustless" consensus to validate transactions.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1567-blockchain-explained/

 

[DelJo63]

The business most exposed to blockchain technology is the Wire Transfer business, like SWIFT, used by the major banks. Of course money grams and paypal will too.

 

[Kevin82485]

Great write up. Cleared up some unknowns and questions that I had.

 

[nosuchthing]

What happen when someone decided to drop an EMI bomb fry all the electronic circuit.

 

[tonylukac]

Great article.

 

[woofer]

Considering the various kinds of value at stake, we can be sure the most brilliant IT criminal minds in the world (and a lot of the less brilliant ones...) will be highly motivated in all kinds of ways to subvert every blockchain and involved device they can access. Not trusting anything important to this tech any time soon (if I can prevent it...).

 

[Boilerhog146]

Decent ,informative article,but,
I'm in my mid 50's, I figure it will be 20 years maybe more before this is all a reality. ,I don't think I will have to worry if it goes boom or bust.and besides ,everyone involved are all too GREEDY. to not try to CAPITALIZE, look at the state of it now ffs.

Maybe by the time we can use this .capitalism will be a thing of the past, and this could work.but I think all economies have to crash first. other wise the poor will still get poor ,and the rich will still get rich.the crooks will still be crooks .like every form of security before it ,this will be broken as well.I hope one of my grandkids busts it with his Quantum Gaming rig.it will prolly be some kid that stumbles upon the crack for Blockchain.every chain has a breaking point...

they been creating blocks in the chain for some years now .burning lots of electricity ,destroying the environment in the process ,made some peops wealthy,
lots of talk about its potential uses ,BUT ,has anyone actually started using the blockchain that's been created for anything useful yet?

why is my doctor still using a paper file ,that sits on a shelf. about an inch thick.along with everyone elses. we are not fully utilizing the basic computer yet..but it has potential.

 

[Abraka]

Boilerhog146, the reason your doctor still uses paper files is because of just one reason:
- Medicine is very outdated technology. On purpose.

Because if doctors would connect, exchange information, use expert systems and artificial-intelligence, soon there would be solution for almost all conditions. Very cheap solutions.

Also, those poisons that pharmaceutical companies are selling would quickly be identified and filtered out by expert systems or artificial intelligence. That means most of chemotherapy would end up in thrash, or banned, along with most of statins ("cures" against cholesterol).

People would become healthier, without buying expensive medicine. That's a double loss for medicine:
1) Less pills and vaccines sold means a lot less cash for the big pharma.
2) Cured patients means that medicine lose their cash cows, which they would otherwise milk until their unnatural death.

This is why medicine is so outdated. It should be the leading edge of technology, but it's not. It's the most backwards technology that exists. Not because it can't do better, but because crappy medicine is more profitable than advanced one. Money, money, money...

 

[QuantumPhysics]

The recent investors into Bitcoin/Ethereum and Litecoin don't care about Blockchain or its importance. The only thing they care about is getting a high return on investment.

Those who got in before Bitcoin $5000 and managed to get out above Bitcoin $15,000 are winners.

Those who got in late are the losers of the digital ponzi scheme (right now).

But it's obvious that Blockchain is the future once computing matures enough to efficiently use it and it's very possible that we'll see cryptocurrency riding high again.

As far as investment goes: you should be buying Gold right now.

 

[Boilerhog146]

The recent investors into Bitcoin/Ethereum and Litecoin don't care about Blockchain or its importance. The only thing they care about is getting a high return on investment.

Those who got in before Bitcoin $5000 and managed to get out above Bitcoin $15,000 are winners.

Those who got in late are the losers of the digital ponzi scheme (right now).

But it's obvious that Blockchain is the future once computing matures enough to efficiently use it and it's very possible that we'll see cryptocurrency riding high again.

As far as investment goes: you should be buying Gold right now.

I'd say losers .crypto is dropping like a rock now ,with everyone trying to cash out,at the same time.the stock market is takin a shitkickin as well.well done,
And just because many of us didn't play along or get involved ,doesn't mean.we won't be on the hook with the rest of them, when it crashes .that's what disgusts me about the whole mess.they cause another great depression. we all suffer.

NO, I shoulda bought gold ,back in 1995, when I went to Echo bay mines . Lupin mine,inside the artic circle for a gig as a security official, it was at $250.00 an OZ. then ,BUY WEED NOW! in Canada anyway.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

,BUY WEED NOW! in Canada anyway.

I do agree with that. I've created Weed portfolios already on Scottrade and Etrade.

I buy 10,000 shares of every penny stock.
50 stocks in all with more than 1 million shares spread across portfolios.

I got BLOZF at .15 cents and it's risen into the $2.90 range...but I'm not selling off yet. Cannabix has technology coming to market within a year or two and I'm gonna profit BIGLY off of them.

 

[corvard]

Blockchain is BS, it's slow, energy-inefficient and has no real application.

 

[TechLess71]

I always hear that Ethereum is superior to bitcoin because there are many more developers on the ethereum platform. How does the fact that there are more developers make ethereum more valuable?
When developers build an application on ethereum, how does the use of this app relate to the value of ethereum?
Does the working of this app require a ethereum coin.

Thanks

 

[cliffordcooley]

"The process of encrypting blocks is best recognized as "mining" in cryptocurrency, which uses blockchain as a proof of work mechanism whereby people can participate in the network by performing "work" (your spare computing resources are used to encrypt and validate blocks)."

That's the part I will never support. It is so inefficient, it comparable to needing multiple servers per bank teller just to make a single transaction.

 

[mbrowne5061]

"The process of encrypting blocks is best recognized as "mining" in cryptocurrency, which uses blockchain as a proof of work mechanism whereby people can participate in the network by performing "work" (your spare computing resources are used to encrypt and validate blocks)."

That's the part I will never support. It is so inefficient, it comparable to needing multiple servers per bank teller just to make a single transaction.

Cryptography, by its very nature, requires inefficiency to be effective. A distributed cryptographic problem is much harder to hack (socially or technologically) than a centralized one.

 

[Stiqy]

"The process of encrypting blocks is best recognized as "mining" in cryptocurrency, which uses blockchain as a proof of work mechanism whereby people can participate in the network by performing "work" (your spare computing resources are used to encrypt and validate blocks)."

That's the part I will never support. It is so inefficient, it comparable to needing multiple servers per bank teller just to make a single transaction.

Mining a coin and verifying a transaction are not the same thing. The work/CPU cycles/electricity cost everyone is talking about is the mining part. Once a coin is mined, that work never needs to be done again. Yes the blockchain and transactions in bitcoin are also inefficient, but those are two different things.

 

[merikafyeah]

Blockchain can't be scaled BY DESIGN. "Slowness" was built into the system to resist takeover by any single entity but this is also why it becomes so inefficient when talking about things like a future-facing payment system. Additionally a blockchain that increases towards infinity in filesize is the very definition of "anti-longterm-solution". Blockchain simply isn't meant for this. Hashgraph solves both scalability and security; it is the holy grail of financial transaction systems and it is everything blockchain supporters wish the blockchain could be but simply isn't and can't be.

 

[DelJo63]

Blockchain can't be scaled BY DESIGN. "Slowness" was built into the system to resist takeover by any single

I would strongly debate that comment. The system is heavily dependent upon strong encryption and that chews cycles which can not be reduced with caching or other techniques used for scaling up.

 

[merikafyeah]

I would strongly debate that comment. The system is heavily dependent upon strong encryption and that chews cycles which can not be reduced with caching or other techniques used for scaling up.

The blockchain isn't slow because of encryption, it's slow because of the method used to determine consensus, which is the brute-force 51% majority rule, a method which simply cannot be scaled for speed. The more traffic the blockchain gets the higher the transaction fees become and eventually they become prohibitively expensive for small transactions. The blockchain itself is designed to expand towards infinity so eventually the system starts centralizing around those who can afford large amounts of disk space while more and more are forced to trust online wallets. Hashgraph has none of these scalability issues and is the only distributed ledger which possesses both speed and the highest security possible (byzantine fault-tolerant). The cryptocurrency of the future will use Hashgraph, not the blockchain.

 

[DelJo63]

... it's slow because of the method used to determine consensus, which is the brute-force 51% majority rule, a method which simply cannot be scaled for speed....

Good point, however even if the costs of getting to consensus were zero, encryption would STILL never scale.

The cryptocurrency of the future will use Hashgraph, not the blockchain.

Yet to be determined...

 

[WKL studio]

Prospective. Thank you for writing.

I am a writer from Taiwan, and I am composing pop-science articles for educational uses.

Would you mind if I consult your article, formally quoting one paragraph (easily the last), and excerpt three pictures and a video with their origins attached, noting they are all from your article?

I'd be very appreciated if you grant so, and thanks again for your informative contents.

 

[DelJo63]

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