In a digital world, managing individual items is a challenge, as it is far to easy to copy them creating copies (and reducing the value of each).
The blockchain provides a way of validating across different sources the creation and transfer of cryto-currencies such as BitCoin. But what is it, and how does it actually work? This post endeavours to tell you.
Take this blog for example..
As you are reading this don’t know when each item was actually published, or if it was changed, or even if this is my own original page. And I don’t know if some is just reading this page, or copying it and using for their own in some other blog elsewhere..
So in terms of authenticity, a blog provides not provide very much. It may claim things, such as an author or a publish on date, but these things can be changed after the fact.. So it would be possible for me (for example) to publish an item today claiming to be posted in 2009, and you wouldn’t know any different. And my blog post may reference other blog posts in my own blog, or posts in others blogs. If I reference a post that occurred after my “fictitious” publication date, you might smell a rat.. or suspect a later blog update that isn’t clearly marked.
But if each blog post as it was published is added to a immutable decentralised repository that everyone could access, then you would know that this blog post was truly posted on the 31st August 2016. (If it occurred between other posts in 2017, for example, this is a backdated blog post).
I would be able to search through the repository for other instances of this page for digital plagiarism, as would you. And I signed my entry in the repository with my digital publishers certificate, then you would know I am the poster of this page.
Any changes to made to the post after publication would also be entered in the repository too, so this would allow you to go back and see previous versions of the page, making the post publication editing process more open.
So we now have a technology that allows us to authenticate transactions (e.g publishing a blog page), make changes such as ownership (in the case of BitCoin transactions) or version (in the blog post example). This is essentially the blockchain.
The blockchain is a way of creating a decentralised repository updated regularly and coherently across the Internet and allows a way of storing items with attribution information so that they have an audit trail of verifiable information as to all the changes that occur on the blockchain.
It’s up to you to define what you store in it; blog pages; crypto-currency, land titles and deeds, commercial contracts, and point-to-point digital item transfers without intermediaries, the blockchain provides the ability to deliver all this.