[2017-05-23] Firstpost: How blockchain technology could change our lives

How blockchain technology could change our lives

http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/how-blockchain-technology-could-change-our-lives-377721.html

How Blockchain Technology Could Change Our Lives — this is the title of a February 2017 report by the European Parliamentary Research Service addressed to the members and staff of the European Parliament. This and similar headlines are resounding across tech conferences, academia, governments and businesses all over the world.

Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain is currently being touted as the next big invention following the Internet itself. It is expected that Blockchain would facilitate “trust” through transparency that was difficult to secure on the Internet.

So what exactly is Blockchain?

Blockchain is the underlying ledger used to record transactions in a digital currency, “Bitcoin”. Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin in 2008 through a clever combination of cryptography, game theory and computer science. It is a shared, public, distributed, nonrepudiable, immutable record of all transactions in the digital currency. It is written and maintained by a network of voluntary nodes that achieve consensus through a difficult Proof of Work.