What Is Blockchain: How Did This Technology Come About?

How Did Blockchain Come About?

Let’s understand what blockchain is starting from the starting point and how the emergence and evolution of this technology took place. Digging deep into its origins, what we now call blockchain began to take shape back in 1991.

With the development of cryptography and technology improvement, we have arrived at a definition of blockchain today. And let’s understand now how the whole process works.

Blockchain: How Does It Work?

So that you can better understand what blockchain is, we are going to explain in a little more detail how the transaction process works and show you how secure it is.

Follow every step!

Transaction Record

The first step of a transaction is its registration. To help you get a clearer view of this process, think of the blockchain as something similar to an Excel spreadsheet. 

In this worksheet, you must enter vital information such as the transaction’s origin, destination and, of course, the amount. It is essential to say that the “spreadsheet” is available for updates from others as a shared. 

On the other hand, for everything to be safe, it has to be secret. The idea is that it should not be possible to know which other people are involved in the transaction. How to do this?

Cryptography

To make the transaction anonymous and secure, you need to encrypt it. Confidential information must be protected, one of the pillars of information security.

But how to do it? You can create different addresses from a primary key, formed by a set of characters and numbers. So, to make transactions for someone else, you need to know their address. This will cover up the identity of the people involved, both the sender and the receiver.

The primary key, in this sense, is essential and must be kept carefully, as it will allow those involved to assume the properties of the addresses assigned to them.

Validation

The transaction from person X to Y is not made official immediately. It needs to pass validation to be included in the blockchain.

For this, she goes to a temporary area where she undergoes an analysis approximately every 10 minutes. During this period, transactions worldwide in the temporary area are analyzed by a person in charge, called a miner.

This response is nothing more than a computer connected to the blockchain network, which passes through a system where it gains the right to validate pending transactions. Once this is done, he receives a prize in bitcoins.

And so it goes, successively, every 10 minutes. But how does a miner decide if a transaction can be made official? It will check the authenticity of the action and verify that the digital signature is genuine and that there is not someone simulating addresses and transactions in their account.

It is then that the date of the operation is also made official, and the transaction receives a signature that works as an ID for identification, generating new encrypted data.

These elements — digital signature, ID, key and encryption — provide complete security to the transaction process on the blockchain.

Change Blocking

We still have considerable detail to explain. Well, we said earlier that the “spreadsheet” is available for others to make changes to, right? This can be a danger, as person X could erase or change the value of a transaction carried out by person Y, right?

Not really. This is thanks to a little secret that is the basis of all the genius of blockchain. You see, we call a mathematical operation or function a hash. There are many varieties of different hash functions. 

When selecting one of these methods, whenever you make changes to a specific value, it will generate the same simplified sequence of characters and numbers.

Also Read: Understand 5 Advantages Of Blockchain For Businesses