Peter Van Valkenburgh: What Is “Blockchain” Anyway?

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It is often cited as a panacea for all manner business and governance problems. We should probably talk about cars, trains, boats, or rocket ships, depending on what it is about vehicles that we are interested in. We know this for sure because the word was originally invented to name and describe the distributed ledger of bitcoin transactions that is created by the Bitcoin network.

Aside from being in some way inspired by Bitcoin what do all of these technologies have in common? All blockchain technologies should have three constituent parts: You might be wondering why we call them blockchain technologies if the blockchain is just one of three essential parts.

It probably just comes down to good branding. Ever since Napster and BitTorrent, the general public has unfortunately come to associate peer-to-peer networks with piracy and copyright infringement. But understanding each of those three constituent parts makes blockchain technology suddenly easier to understand.

And each part of that sentence corresponds to our three constituent technologies. The computers are connected in a peer-to-peer network. If your computer is a part of a blockchain network it is talking directly to other computers on that network, not through a central server owned by a corporation or other central party. Agreement between all of the connected computers is facilitated by using a consensus mechanism.

That means that there are rules written in software that the connected computers run, and those rules help ensure that all the computers on the network stay in sync and agree with each other. And the thing they all bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness on is this shared data called a blockchain.

The blockchain format simply makes data easy for machines to verify the consistency of a long and growing log of data. Later bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness entries must always reference earlier entries, creating a linked chain of data.

Any attempt to alter an early entry bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness necessitate altering every subsequent entry; otherwise, digital signatures embedded in the data will reveal a mismatch. Specifically how that all works is beyond the scope of this backgrounder, but it mostly has to do with the science of cryptography and digital signatures. The blockchain data structure will make alterations evident, but if the people running the connected computers choose to accept or ignore the alterations then they will remain.

They are any devices on the Internet running Bitcoin-compatible software. So some people might use a Bitcoin wallet that is created and maintained by a company. To be compatible with the Bitcoin network any software you run on your Internet-connected device must follow these rules. If your software is modified to try and break the rules, then the messages it sends on the Internet will be ignored by all the other computers running honest, rule-obeying Bitcoin software.

There are a bunch of rules in the Bitcoin consensus mechanism, but we can highlight two of them here and transcribe them roughly from computer code into natural language:. That first rule is pretty self-explanatory. Recall that the connected computers are talking directly to one another, and keep in mind that those computers could be anywhere in the world because it all works on top of the global Internet.

If some computers are in, for example, China, and others are in the U. A connected computer in China might think the most recent transactions came bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness this order: While a computer in the U.

How do we make sure all the computers agree on the order? Well, as rule 2 specifies, every 10 minutes one computer will be chosen to state the authoritative order of transactions for that period of time, and then another will be chosen, and so on. In computer science, this arrangement is called a repeated leader election, but unlike a normal political election, the periodic leader is simply chosen at random. If the chosen leader tried to include a transaction where they gave themselves millions of counterfeit bitcoins, then they would have broken rule one.

Their scammy messages are simply ignored by the rest of the computers as per the rules of the consensus mechanism. The chosen leader can, however, write themselves a coinbase transaction that will reward them for their honest work in maintaining the network. That money creation schedule is just another rule within the Bitcoin consensus mechanism software. This is just a list of all Bitcoin transactions that have occurred since the network started in Of course, the real Bitcoin blockchain has many more transactions in it, millions since the network started.

Think of it like a password. What about other, non-Bitcoin blockchain technologies? Well, they all follow the same design bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness. There are two things that can differ from Bitcoin, however. The shared data may be different, and the consensus mechanism may be engineered with different design choices. Or the data could be the current state of a running computation.

Not all vehicles are good for all use cases. Permissioned blockchain technologies retain some power at the center of the bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness because—at the very least—there will be one party who is relied upon to identity permitted member computers and provision them with an access credential.

Those are the primary possible differences between blockchain technologies. Reprinted from Coin Center. This article was originally published on FEE. Read the original article. Given the cleverness of black hat computer nerds, and the many instances of computer systems being hacked, how does one establish a level of confidence that the Chinese and North Koreans are not going to game the cryptocurrency systems?

They must be working their bits and butts off to this end around the clock. If any miner gets good at it, they get paid more, so the best hash breakers are always the most visible. Bitcoin would not exist without Blockchain, which will drive the next round of innovation. The equivalent of knocking off the bank, rather than forgery. And there seems to be enough success and lack of official retribution to keep the hackers frantic….

Why is the price going up? Is there counterfeit Bitcoin? The Woz is a true hippy that should never be actually in charge of anything beyond his bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness lab. On apple though,is Apple pay an example of centralised block chain,while itunes accounts are not?

As bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness retired teacher myself, it could be worth commenting that Sinc and a few others who have previously put up articles on the subject might learn some basic teaching techniques from it! That is, if they thought they were clearly explaining the system to dunderheads like me. A few questions, though. We were assured that the firewalls were utterly secure. We seem to have spent the last 20 years constantly being reminded that cast-iron assurances by computer experts are very ephemeral, to say the least.

The most worrying idea, though, is that countries might think the system is so secure that it will enable on-line voting.

I know that the Deep State war against Trump is pretty amateurish at the moment but they might improve! And China is more interested in political control than a few million or even trillion in purely monetary gains. So I think we should still be very wary indeed. An explanation that I can comprehend! I understand that the blockchain is an online ledger for bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. I know bitcoins are exchanged for items or services, just like a fiat currency. But apart from that, what is it good for?

Where else is this alleged innovation going to be utilised. Teflon has multiple uses. Here is a list of things that everybody should know about blockchains. These facts will not only help you make better sense of this new technology, but it may even equip you for your next trivia hour or business exchange.

The ledger is constantly updated and each participant has their own copy of it. Velcro fasteners seemed the same at first — limited use, right? Plenty if you think about it, and not all are bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness financial. Kneelbitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness on December 12, at 2: If the internet goes down, all of it, and forever, you will have a lot more to worry about than where your bitcoins went, given how pervasive it is in controlling all of the vital logistics of life.

So git can be used in a centralized manner like github or decentralized peer-to-peer. Git does NOT have a consensus resolution mechanism, although it does bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness conflict detection, although if you wanted to add your own consensus resolution you could do that. Git does NOT attempt to run any miners, nor is it meaningful to do so in the context of version control.

Git does NOT have a mechanism to either hide or verify the user identity either, although since user identity is just an email address you can use plenty of other mechanisms like PGP if you feel like it. I just have a bitcoin going to $1million replace central banksmacrobusiness time envisioning what else it could be used for.

So without a central Authority, who polices criminal activity? Bitcoin is used extensively as payment to purchase decryption keys for cryptolocker malware for example. Everyone is anonymous, 5 gazillion bit encryption and so on.

IP addresses can be spoofed and are virtually untraceable run through multiple VPN connections. And yes I understand the data miners figure it out but so what?

By that time they figure it out and post a block chain, the criminals have laundered it through a multitude of other accounts, cash it in against hard currency. And the fact that the value of bitcoin is going through the roof against the greenback, is based entirely on the magnetic alignment of particles on a SAS drive and little else. It still smells like a Ponzy scheme to me. The Bitcoin blockchain consists of transactions and hashes … end of story.

Strangely that was good enough for humanity for some tens of thousands of years. If a pirate had a gold earring then it was still just the same gold.

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Statistics are not correct for now because of poloniex API bug. Payments are independently tracked not solely reliant on block chains.