Functional Characteristics of Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is in essence a distributed storage system, which can also be called a distributed bookkeeping system due to its transaction bookkeeping storage model. Beijing Muqi Mobile Technology Co., Ltd, a professional blockchain development company, welcome exchanges and cooperation. The following is about the functional characteristics of blockchain technology.

In traditional platform technology, central decision-making is a very common way of data processing, for example, in the traditional way of bank transfers, the transaction information has to be processed through the bank's central server cluster, and the transaction between two accounts is completed through layers of data upload and instruction distribution. While each transaction in the blockchain is a direct communication and transaction between the two parties, from the initiation of the transaction to the completion of the transaction to confirm, without any intermediary, all nodes are equal, with exactly the same authority, this mode of peer-to-peer transactions in the network, so that the blockchain application is exempt from the risk of intermediary transactions.

It is important to note that although the blockchain is often called a distributed ledger, and even its nature is a distributed storage system, the blockchain is different from regular distributed systems, and its distributed structure is more specific. Distributed is a concept that corresponds to centralization, all the sub-nodes in the centralized structure only interact with the central node for data, and there is no connection between them, so the central node needs to bear all the load, and the efficiency of a centralized system is basically only related to the processing speed of the central node, and at the same time, once the central node has problems such as blocking, deadlocks, downtime, etc., the whole centralized system will then Once the center node is blocked, deadlocked, down and other problems, the entire centralized system will then stagnate or even collapse. Distributed structure is characterized by the existence of multiple nodes that can interact with other nodes, distributed network storage technology is to store the data scattered in multiple independent machines and equipment. This sounds a bit awkward, but it is easy to understand if you categorize it based on the centralized features, distributed architecture includes polycentric and decentralized structures.

A polycentric system is one that consists of multiple centralized systems, each of which includes a master node and several slave nodes. During task processing, the master node disassembles the task into multiple sub-tasks and sends them to its subordinate slave nodes for processing at the same time. After the slave nodes send the processing results back to the master node, the master node will integrate the processing results of each subtask and finally complete the task. Of course, this is only a simplified description of task processing, multi-centralized systems may have multiple layers of master-slave structure, forming a tree-like task allocation structure. At the same time, the slave nodes may also be at the mercy of multiple master nodes for deployment, based on a complex task management mechanism to maximize efficiency. However, the fundamental difference between polycentricity and decentralization is whether there is a central node controlling the operation of each master node, if the topmost node is multiple nodes, then it is decentralized, on the contrary, if there is only one node at the top, it is polycentric.

Within decentralization, there is a more specific type of structure that does not have any centers, which can be called fully decentralized, which is the peer-to-peer network structure that is reflected in the Bitcoin network. The relative advantages of the peer-to-peer network structure are high fault tolerance, node scalability, privacy, and data consistency, but there are corresponding problems of redundant communication and message delays.

Figure 5 Schematic diagram of the network structure

The emphasis on "decentralization" in the blockchain field mostly refers to the attribution level of the system. A system belonging to a community and all accounts is decentralized, while a system belonging to an institution or even a person is centralized. Decentralization is the same feature of blockchain***, but peer-to-peer networks, a completely decentralized structure, are less used at present, and only public chains such as bitcoin and ethereum belong to this structure, because anyone in the world can access the system at any time to read data, send confirmable transactions, and compete in the act of bookkeeping, which results in its security and system efficiency cannot be guaranteed. Private chain often has one or more centers to control the nodes, all operations need to get the permission of the center and be subject to its constraints and limitations, although it adopts a decentralized mechanism for regular data processing, but it is only a distributed blockchain deployment model in the strict sense. On the other hand, a federated chain can be regarded as a collection of private chains, which is a compromise of the public chain in terms of security and efficiency, and it adopts a polycentric technical architecture.

Blockchain, due to the natural characteristics of tampering, based on the *** knowledge algorithm to ensure data consistency, any node in the system can not tamper with and falsify the transaction, all the content of the transaction is certain and uncontroversial, the transaction will not have credit risk, then the blockchain system also has a de-trusted characteristics.

Based on the change of the content carried in the block from transaction to smart contract, there are two phases of blockchain de-trusting, the first phase is the trust in the authenticity of the historical transaction behavior in the blockchain network, and the second phase is the trust in the future transaction behavior based on the rules of smart contract.

The first stage of trust in the authenticity of historical behavior can be simply understood as the blockchain system dispensing with the process of proving historical transactions. When we explain to others that something has happened before, we need to have evidence to make others believe, and this evidence often needs a credible third party to prove, and through the means of authentication to provide credit guarantee. For example, the electronic transaction form provided by the shopping platform when making online purchases is evidence, the tax office invoice provided by the restaurant when eating out is evidence, or the marriage certificate provided by the organization when using the couple's identity to purchase a house is evidence. And the person who receives such information also needs to verify the authenticity of such evidence in order to be sure that these things really happened. Corresponding to the previous article, when there is a dispute over online shopping, it is necessary to check whether the electronic transaction list of the shopping platform is real; when making meal reimbursement, it is necessary to verify the signature of the invoice; when confirming the identity of two people as husband and wife, it is necessary to verify the anti-forgery mark of the marriage certificate. However, the data of the blockchain system is considered to be immutable and unfalsifiable, so as long as it is to the other nodes on the chain to explain a historical event does not require any third-party proof, because the information on the data block can be taken out at any time to directly verify, which forms the blockchain of the history of the transaction of the de-trust.

The second stage of trust in the behavior of future transactions, because ideally, the blockchain's smart contracts are tied to the business, i.e., the smart contracts have enforceability in the blockchain system. This is because the smart code is fully public and is recorded in the main chain being stored by all accounts. When the smart contract is invoked or triggered by a mechanism, the transaction will be enforced and there is no possibility of reneging. Therefore, users in the blockchain system do not have to worry about each other's credit risk in the future, which creates a de-trusted future transaction.

In the public chain, each node's ledger has a complete record of all transactions, and the blockchain does not directly carry out real-time recording of account information, but rather derives real-time account information by means of transaction tracing, and at the same time, since anyone can create a blockchain account in order to form a blockchain node, then the information in the public chain can be regarded as being public to everyone, which forms the openness of the blockchain and traceability characteristics. And because the code of the public chain is often open source, what is open and traceable is not only the transaction data in the system, but also the transaction rules of the whole system, and the high degree of openness and transparency makes the blockchain satisfy many application scenarios that require open data.

However, the blockchain has also developed a variety of variants based on the Bitcoin network, such as lighter nodes, as well as private and federated chains, which do not satisfy the strict sense of open traceability. Light nodes can only execute and validate transactions and do not have all the transaction data to go back to, so light nodes do not have traceability. However, this problem only lies in the user's choice, if there is a good enough hardware environment, the user can choose to become a full node instead of a light node in order to grasp all the data. In addition, joining the private chain and the alliance chain requires an access license or verification, and the read access is selectively open to the public, not open to the whole network, which does not satisfy the strict sense of openness.