Blockchain101

                        

Anyone who has ever nodded politely at the mention of blockchain, while secretly breaking into a cold sweat and praying for a change of subject. I hear you, my friend. Here to help is a no-nonsense explanation of what blockchain means and what you might use it for.

What is Blockchain ?

A Blockchain is a highly secure way of recording transactions and contractual agreements. It’s a tamper-resistant, digital ledger, visible to all the individuals, companies, service providers or other parties involved in a business transaction. 

Use Cases

To understand it's use cases take a simple example of journey of milk from farm to consumer .

1. The dairy farm: milking and initial storage,
2. Processing: transportation to a dairy processor for  pasteurizing and packaging,
3. Transportation: shipping in refrigerated trucks to retailers like supermarkets or stores,
4. Consumption: customer purchase and consumption.
   Already, there are many number of intermediaters involved in this supply chain, each with their own record of their part in the transaction. If the milk is being shipped abroad, the list grows even longer to include entities like customs officials and port authorities,etc.
   
   
   The difficulty with a supply chain like this one is that there isn’t a single, synchronized record of the transaction from beginning to end. And this is why we need blockchain. Blockchain is a single, synchronized, stable record of every transaction, visible to everyone in the supply chain.

The blockchain ledger records the sequence of transactions from the beginning to the end of the supply chain. This means you can easily trace the path from the dairy farm to the consumer with super transparency and security.

Generally it is used in three ways :

1. Record Exchange of money.
2. Document the way goods move through a supply chain.
3. Create and store contractual agreements.   

 Three main features of Blockchain are :

1. Distributed : It means that the record is shared, and cannot be controlled by any single person.
2. Permissioned :  In this each participant has secure access to the record. No new record can be added without the say-so of the other participants, and no individual record ‘block’ can be deleted.
3. Secure :  since no-one person can manipulate the record , this makes it secure and what you get is an audited record of information, for which all parties are accountable.

   Written by- utkarsh singh

    

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