Blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.
It’s more of like a distributed and database/decentralized ledger technology (DLT).
Question
Why do we need Blockchain when we already have advanced and efficient systems?
The key answer to that is ‘Maliciousness’.
In all systems, there are authoritative people who can be dishonest, a black sheep. They possess the authority to tamper other’s data and even system logs.
Take banking systems for an example, there will always be a central authority who possess the power to change and manipulate user data . Of course there would be some sort of accountability but the possibility of data being tampered by a malicious authoritative figure in itself is a vulnerability. Therefore, there’s a need for decentralization in such critical systems.
Another critical issue in modern systems is the presence of a single point of failure. We need a system which doesn’t possess a vulnerability in any way.
Another most critical vulnerability is the possibility of alteration by a black sheep. Our current database systems which are used in almost all of our critical systems have the ability to create, read, update and delete values stored in it. Any malicious authoritative figure with proper rights in a database can update or delete values unethically in the same place. There won’t be any mechanism to track that change if the culprit does his job cleanly.
Blockchain provides the immutability feature to solve this feature. It just doesn’t allows any change or update in an existing record. It maintains a chain of changes for a value AKA a chain of blocks. There is no chance of deleting or updating the data in-place cleanly. This solves our problem of malicious alteration. Even if someone modifies the data in a stored block in some sort of way, Blockchain has algorithms to track the changes made.
Lastly, Blockchain utilizes cryptography for securing the blocks of data it is storing.
Abstract
Blockchain isn’t a new technology but more of like a methodology that introduces implementation principles to address the limitation in our current critical storage systems.
We see a lot of cases in our daily life where people disclaim something that they didn’t do it or someone is just unjustly charged or alleged of doing something they didn’t do.
Blockchain solves all of those problems with its efficient methodologies and principles.