Block Chain Overview

For a long time I was procrastinating on coming up with this. But I think It’s high time now.

The block chain world has so evolved and we have got lot of clarity about the future aspects and implementation of this.

Web 2.0 (current web) revolves around data driven targeted marketing. It’s ruled by tech giants and is an environment of data communism. Data is nothing but us. It’s scary but machine learning models knows more about us than we do.

We are finding ways to democratize the data stored without compromising the user experience we are getting these days.

So in terms of IT development, we are much more than satisfied with the UI that we see, the way our back end reacts. It’s just the unregulated data layer which can be engineered.

Now Imagine a world where actions are recorded yet can’t be used to create unnecessary desires within us. Imagine where your work has an unique identity, and the rights of it can be sold. A world where you can lend money directly to the needy cutting the chase of middlemen. Sounds too fairy? Well that can be achieved to an extent by blockchain.

But Subham, what is blockchain? What are the buzz words that revolve around the term blockchain, Why is it picking up so fast and what the heck is crypto.

I’ll be answering all of them with real life examples.

Blockchain revolves most around the term ledgers. Ledgers are simply records of transition of any form.

Let’s say When we pay online, do we/our bank physically deliver the amount to the respective person? No they just move some numbers from your account to theirs. It’s all the game of numbers and records.

Ledger is maintaining the records of exchanges, It is being used since 5000 years, earlier when we had barter system even then ledger played an important role.

Till date these records are saved in bank’s personal database, and we indeed pay them for book keeping. The middlemen. These companies even sell our data for targeted marketing.

We wonder if there was a way of de-centralizing these books and cut the middlemen. Oh wait! Who is going to maintain the record, Wouldn’t it cause chaos?

That’s the beauty of the concept called blockchain

Block chain comprises of network of trusted parties(computers) who manage these transitions/records. Every transaction that you make is a block that is created and are validated by these trusted parties. Once the transaction is validated, it stays there forever. The transaction is not only stored in 1 server, rather copies of it is distributed over the network(hash encrypted). It’s more like a torrent network. There is a performance trade off here, but we are on the verge of closing this gap too.

So in simple terms block chain is just de-centralizing our classic databases.

Distributing data across the system and rest of the application remains the same. So from our traditional application replace the database layer with the blockchain, of course there is more to it, but this would be good as an entry point.

There are different kind of blockchain present in market and under process.

Transactions made on this network requires it’s own token. It’s core of any trade. Consider each block chain as a different country, to exchange goods, you need currency of that very country.

Say you are on Ethereum network, You need ETH to do any kind of transaction, Let’s suppose you have bitcoins and you want to trade on Ethereum network, like real world you go to currency exchange.

There are lot of trading applications available in the market using which you can trade ether(ETH) for any of the currency or token.

You also have wallets in blockchain ecosystem where you keep your online assets(coins, nfts etc) secure.

I personally am not a fan of crypto trading but I’m in here for this revolutionary concept.

There are lot of advancement made in blockchain itself, till date we have 3 generations of blockchain. I won’t be getting into the details, however I’ll publish a whole different article on it, Once I’m done, You’ll find the url here.

Block chain comes with some tradeoffs . There might not be too much of validators that are present to monitor the transactions, the market is too volatile, Unregulated market, unmonitored transactions, Scalability, performance of a transaction. But we are getting reigns to each of them one by one. Lot of it has been resolved by introduction of something called smart contracts, dApps, DeFi.(I’ll talk about all 3 in my coming blog)

Concluding, block chain can be considered as a way of distributing the data over a network rather than saving it in someone else’s computer and giving them rights to do whatever they can. The security of this spread data is ensure by a hash, I won’t get into technical of security as it is a big concept and can’t be covered under the scope of this blog.

For any suggestion or query, feel free to jump into my DM.

Thanks,

Subham Saraf

I'm Subham Saraf, A full-stack developer based in India,

I pursuing my masters in Data science and a blockchain enthusiast. With intensive experience in Web-App development I also specialize in building dApps and smart contracts on Solana platform.

Proposing solutions for software development that makes development process more intuitive and updated.