What Is Blockchain

What Is Blockchain

Assume you want to send/transfer money to a friend who is in another country or any place else. Now for the first step in this process, you approach the bank and give it details regarding your friend’s bank account and ask them to process the amount requested. The bank successfully transfers the sum to your friend but now has to update both yours and your friend’s “ledgers” of the money debited & credited respectively and the various details involved in the transaction. The previously mentioned process is easy to do, but the privacy and security of it are questionable. Then comes blockchain to the rescue.

Previously assume these transaction details are written into an excel sheet, which is shared across various people/networks and is accessible to everyone and can be manipulated as seen fit. Blockchain can be assumed as the lock on that particular excel sheet containing the transaction details which unlike the excel sheet which is made up of rows and columns is made up of blocks. A block can be thought of as a structure containing various blocks chained together where each block is a collection of data.

Data is added to the blockchain by adding it to a block, and this is done chronologically. The first block in such a blockchain is called the Genesis block, and the rest of the data added follows the Genesis block.