It is possible that you have not heard this expression or that it is not clear to you what Blockchain is, but sooner or later you are going to end up seeing data about this, since it is a paradigm shift in our way of understanding the digital world that will end up being integrated into our lives, or at least that is what the experts say. Below we will tell you more details about this new digital technique and the uses it has.
What is Blockchain?
First of all, to understand this new technique it is necessary to give it context. Blockchain comes to mean “chain of blocks”, which is very illustrative of how it works and what its use is today. It was born as a secondary actor during the rise of bitcoin, since it is the technology or information coding system that is behind the virtual currency and that supports its entire structure. After a while, it was understood the great potential it had on its own and the large number of uses and applications it allows in other areas beyond financial transactions, such as public administration or the Internet of Things.
How Blockchain works and new technologies
What has made Blockchain such a popular technique in recent years has been that it is a technology that allows the transfer of digital data with very sophisticated encryption and in a completely secure manner. To give an example, Blockchain is the space where the input and output records of information about a product, exchange, etc. remain. That is to say, a consumer will be able to follow the entire production chain of a product to the primary supplier thanks to Blockchain technology.
But, apart from that, it offers a novel advantage. And this transfer does not require a centralized intermediary to identify and certify the information, but rather it is distributed in multiple independent nodes that register and validate it without the need for trust between them. All information that is created based on this technology cannot be deleted, which contributes to transparency when managing commercial exchanges or closing deals.
Another great advantage of this system is that it provides great security to the system. Even if the network went down at certain points, the fact that only one node was active would allow the information to never be lost. This way the system can continue working without any problem.
Blockchain: functionality example
Let’s see an example of how this new technology works. The blockchain, as its name suggests, is a chain of blocks. Each of these blocks contains the encoded information of a transaction on the network. Therefore, Blockchain acts as a guarantor of the registration of the activity, but it will be the network of distributed nodes that will have to certify that this data is true. How does it work?
Each block in the chain carries the transaction package and two codes, one that indicates which block precedes it (except the origin block, of course), and another for the block that follows it, that is, they are intertwined or chained by what are called codes or hash pointers. Now the concept of mining carried out by the nodes comes into play, that is, the information validation process. In this mining or verification process, when there are two blocks that point to the same previous block, the first one to be decrypted by the majority of the nodes simply wins, that is, the majority of points in the network must agree to validate the information. Therefore, although Blockchain generates multiple chains of blocks, the longest chain of blocks will always be legitimized.
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