Block Chain - An identity of the future

In 2008, “Satoshi Nakamoto” is the name used by the unknown person or persons who designed the protocol for digital cash that used an underlined Crypto currency called “Bitcoin” which enabled people to do transactions without involving any third party like the banks.

To put it in a perspective, Money is a ledger. Fiat currency like US Dollar is legal tender whose value is backed by the government that issued it, which is maintained & controlled by its central banks.

With Bitcoin, the ledger is decentralized which means no one individual or entity has the power to arbitrarily create new units (thereby causing inflation), freeze (or seize) your account, or block a particular payment from being processed

The underlying technology behind “Bitcoin” sparked interest among people which is called the “Block Chain”.

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger or decentralized database that keeps records of digital transactions. Rather than having a central administrator like a traditional banks, a distributed ledger has a global network of replicated databases, synchronized via the internet and visible to anyone within the network.

When a digital transaction is carried out, it is grouped together in a cryptographically protected block with other transactions that have occurred in the last 10 minutes and sent out to the entire network. Miners (Users in the network with high levels of compute power) who then compete to validate the transactions by solving complex coded problems.The first miner to solve the problems and validate the block receives a reward.

The validated block of transactions is then time stamped & added to a chain in a linear, chronological order. New blocks of validated transactions are linked to older blocks, making a chain of blocks that show every transaction made in the history of that blockchain. The entire chain is continually updated so that every ledger in the network is the same, giving each member the ability to prove who owns what at any given time.This makes the Blockchain network hard to crack by malicious people.

Its "Immutable vault"for recording the history of transactions, financial documents like property documents,financial bonds,land records even personal identification records which will be stored in encrypted chained block of data in network.

Major applications of blockchain include cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, BlackCoin, Dash, and Nxt and blockchain platforms like Factom as a distributed registry, Gems for decentralized messaging, MaidSafe for decentralized applications, Storj for a distributed cloud, and Tezos for decentralized voting

Some of the major organizations who are racing to adapt blockchain tech include UBS, Microsoft, IBM and PwC etc.

Blockchain might disrupt hundreds of industries that rely on intermediaries, including banking, finance, academia, real estate, insurance, legal, health care and the public sector etc. That is why Blockchain is listed as one of the top disruptive technologies of the modern times.