The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology

Architecturally, the base layer of the blockchain is a peer-to-peer network. A blockchain pushes for decentralization via peer processing at its node locations. The network is really the computer. You verify each other transaction at the peer-to-peer level.

The blockchain is a meta technology because it affects other technologies, and it is made up of several technologies itself.

A decentralized scheme (which blockchain protocols are based on), transfers authority and trust to a decentralized virtual network, and enables its nodes to continuously and sequentially record transactions on a public “block,” creating a unique “chain,” the blockchain. Each successive block contains a “hash” (a unique fingerprint) of the previous

Carrying a secure wallet with our full electronic medical record in it, or our stored DNA, and allowing its access, in case of emergency.

We have transactions that can get validated without a third party. Now, you’re thinking—how about databases? We have always thought that databases are trusted repositories for holding assets. In the case of the blockchain, the ledger is that irrefutable record that holds the register of transactions that have been validated by the blockchain networ

But the blockchain is a different construct. It is more of a new protocol that sits on top of the Internet, just as the World Wide Web sits on top of the Internet via its own technology standards.

Currently, all existing blockchain protocols have the property that every computer in the network must process every transaction—a property that provides extreme degrees of fault tolerance and security, but at the cost of ensuring that the network's processing power is effectively bounded by the processing power of a single node.

Time stamping is a basic function that permanently registers on the blockchain the time that a particular action took place. For example, this could be the recording of an asset’s change of ownership, or the fact that an action occurred, like a medical exam or a specific transaction.

Old intermediaries that are threatened by technology always die hard. They do not simply roll over. They keep fighting while they are shrinking. Newspapers, cable television providers, and travel agents are some examples.

A blockchain is like a place where you store any data semi-publicly in a linear container space (the block). Anyone can verify that you’ve placed that information, because the container has your signature on it, but only you (or a program) can unlock what’s inside the container, because only you hold the private keys to that data, securely.