Man I read that note at the very end when I had already typed this post!
Anyways, here are my views. I hope you'd take them literally & not personally. I only spent this time because you asked for it. You have my love zebpay
In the blockchain, a copy of the ledger file is shared between thousands of participants globally, also called miners.
'also called nodes'. Also something else should be used instead of 'shared'(something like 'replicated'), as everyone has their own copy & not a shared copy.
New bitcoin transactions are added in the blockchain by a consensus of a majority of the miners
'consensus of majority' makes no sense. consensus means unanimity, and is very different from majority. Also in bitcoin, consensus is achieved not by majority (like votes in democracy) but by lottery; someone wins a lottery and everyone has a consensus on it. Only conflicts are resolved (such as multiple parties winning this lottery) by a majority of hashing power. Even in such case it is not a forced consensus that everyone has to obey but an implicit consensus in the sense that majority will win in the long run (unlike a democratic majority where minority has to agree to majority decision) and in fact there is a small probability that majority might even lose.
People do mining because they receive new created bitcoins in return for their efforts.
mostly they don't, hence the mining variance problem, hence the mining centralization
Once a transaction is entered in the blockchain, it can never be erased or modified.
except in case of reorganization, hence we like 6 confirmations. You can mention something about probability increasing but I don't know how you'd want to word it.
First, the miner who has the most common version of the blockchain. So for example, if a miner cheats and enters a wrong bitcoin transaction to benefit himself, he will have a minority version of the blockchain as no one else will have that transaction in their version. So he will lose.
Sorry but this makes no sense to me.
if a miner cheats and enters a wrong bitcoin transaction <- they cannot! because of cryptography. They can only perform a double spend attack and that would involve reorganization. Perhaps it should be that 'the miner should have that version of blockchain which majority of miners have, irrespective of whether it is the most common version among nodes, because otherwise, in the long run, his mined block might become invalid.'
Before the Internet, to provide for example, voice calling between India and the US would require a multi billion dollar company like AT&T to lay its own cable between the 2 countries and use it. Calls used to be very expensive because this infrastructure would be very expensive. With the Internet, a company like Skype can simply make an app and use the Internet to do voice calls. And now, forget voice calls, even video calls are free.
This makes it seem as if the network is no longer required. No, the same network is still required to be laid but the difference is that we interpret the same signals in different ways - earlier it was just perceived as sound, but now that same phone line carrying the same sound signals are interpreted as packets (for ex if we assume that a sound above a freq will be considered as 1 and below it is 0, so now we can send any digital content as a soundwave modulating its frequency!) and thus we can send anything. It is not free, we pay the same price for transmission of signals, just that, earlier we could send only sound signals, now the same sound signals can carry any digital content.
Just like the Internet, these companies now have the option to record their transactions on the blockchain at a minimal cost. These transactions are recorded forever and they do not have to worry about its security. Hence, they have the opportunity to save billions of dollars.
No way sir! The demand for a replicated database is virtually infinite and it would be costlier to store data on blockchains because now the data is unalterable.
But the public blockchain which runs on bitcoins is far cheaper and more efficient and more secure. Private blockchains are like private intranets. Intranets have failed and over time, everyone has realized that it is far better to do everything on the ‘public’ Internet.
There is a difference between internet and intranets with bitcoin & private chains - If i perform a malicious attack on your server it won't bring all of the internet down, but a wrong transaction did fork the bitcoin network and brought the entire network down. Bitcoin is not truly decentralized in the sense that value of my bitcoin is related to value of your coins, centralized by that 21million figure. So personally, due to various reasons I believe there will be thousands, if not millions, of blockchains.
And this is by far, the biggest and most secure blockchain the world currently has.
Not necessarily, I was talking to Greg Maxwell and he had this opinion that purely in terms of energy burnt the litecoin network might be burning more energy than bitcoin.
Can the blockchain work without bitcoin?
Absolutely. Can a blockchain work without a unique decentralized token? No.
