What is "blockchain"?

The blockchain is a public ledger. There is no centralized hardware or management organization. Anyone can automatically verify the authenticity of the ledger and easily discover whether the ledger has been tampered with by others.

In a word, the blockchain is a public ledger that can be verified by everyone.

The concept of being verifiable by everyone is crucial to blockchain.

Bitcoin uses the blockchain to record all transactions, so anyone knows the number of Bitcoins on each account.

So, as a publicly verifiable ledger, what are some use cases for blockchain?

In fact, there are many use cases that can be thought of. Blockchain is suitable for any data that can be recorded on a public ledger. Here are 4 examples:

1. Decentralized domain name server, namely domain currency. The domain name server is actually a ledger that records domain names.

2. Trustless public key encryption, such as https that discards unreliable certification authorities.

3. Ownership records, truthfully record the items and their corresponding owners.

4. Contracts and performance guarantees, the account book truthfully records the parties to the contract and saves the contract text.

But don’t forget that blockchain also has a very important component.

The ledger recorded using blockchain technology will always be updated. New data such as transactions, domain name inputs, records and contracts will be converted into hash values ??of the same length by the hash algorithm and saved. However, hashing algorithms are not only not free but also very expensive.

Therefore, the ledger itself needs to have a recognition system to recognize the person who enters the block hash value.

In Bitcoin, this system is called mining and is rooted in the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin miners use a hash algorithm to convert transactions waiting for verification into hash values, and charge a certain amount of Bitcoin as a service fee.

Therefore, for non-monetary use cases, blockchain needs to find a way to bear the high cost of hashing algorithms.

I would like to remind everyone that my answer mainly focuses on the possible use cases of blockchain technology, and does not cover all aspects of blockchain, such as why hashing algorithms are so expensive. I'm sure you can find a lot of detailed information about Bitcoin and other blockchain applications online.

Supplement

Although blockchain technology has many advantages, there are still some less than satisfactory use cases. For example, there is no way to convert Bitcoin into any national currency; a ledger with billions of data entries would take up space and be impractical.

Bitcoin has shown the world that blockchain technology is feasible in principle, and people are also trying to solve these increasingly prominent problems, such as technological transformation of Bitcoin or the introduction of a completely Different blockchain technologies. I think the following two methods are worth trying: one is to split the ledger according to certain standards such as the payer address, and the other is to introduce a main blockchain to verify the sub-blockchain. Blockchain technology is ever-changing and dazzling, and it’s unknown whether someone is already making such an attempt. But Bitcoin is still the world's first currency blockchain, what others call a cryptocurrency.

Whether in the technology circle or the financial circle, blockchain has become the hottest word, no one. Blockchain has core advantages such as decentralization and trustlessness, which can perfectly solve the problems of information asymmetry, high transaction costs, and trust of strangers in the development process of the shared economy, making "individual economy" possible. Based on this, blockchain technology is considered to be the core technology with the greatest potential to trigger the fifth wave of disruptive revolution after steam engines, electricity, information and Internet technology.

In this context, a blockchain craze was born in society, and everyone praised it overwhelmingly. Dialectics tells us that everything has flaws, and only by seeing the pros and cons of things can we make rational decisions. Therefore, in this article, Xue Hongyan (Hong Yanweiyu), a senior researcher at Suning Financial Research Institute, focuses on pouring some cold water on the blockchain.

| What is Blockchain

Blockchain, English Blockchain, has a rather mysterious technological flavor in its name, and can be simply broken down into "data blocks" and "links". Each data block contains all the information exchange data of the system within a certain period of time, and is encrypted using cryptographic methods; the link means that each block has a link relationship with the next block, thus forming a blockchain.