(3) What Is Public Chain and What will be the Advantages and Disadvantages of Public Chain?
Good evening Steemian and welcome to my Beginners' course homework task 3 which was Lectured by @stream4u of the @cryptoacademy. We have two types of chains open/public and **private, the public chain is accessible to the general users and users are at liberty to modify it, while the private chain are not easily accessible to the general users, you have access to it if you have the permission to access it. Now we are going to focus on the public chain which is what the professor ask us to do. Thank you as you read through.
What Is Public Chain?
We can describe public chain as blockchain that is open to the general public, any users have the permission to access it's protocol, read, modify it if he wants to and can also participate in governing the blockchain ecosystem. Public chain is a distributed and decentralized chain, so it stores transactions as blocks, that are interconnected into a chain. Every transaction on the block must have the time and date of occurrence recoded on it and must also be validated by every computers on the network, before it will be stored into the blockchain.
This validating computers, which are interconnected together are called Nodes. In a public chain, every transaction are made public, and each node have equal records and are similar, this system makes public blockchain to be immutable and transparent, because after data is verified and stored on the public chain, it can be manipulated or altered.
Public chain is open source and uses smart contract mechanism to reach an agreement on the network, once the set condition is achieved, the smart contract will automatically trigger that agreement. We can also describe a public chain are a completely censor-free and transparent ledger that is decentralized, have it data encrypted and store this data's in different nodes and in different locations. It's very hard to hack a public chain, if not impossible, because it data is distributed among the nodes and if one node have error, other nodes can easily pinpoint it.
What will be the Advantages and Disadvantages of Public Chain?
Advantages
Open Source
Public chain is permissionless, so you don't need permission to access it, you can access it, read, modify. It's open to the general public.Decentralized
It is decentralized, so therefore can not be controlled by one person or a group of person's but by the general nodes on the networkSecured
A public chain data is secure, because it can't be modify or alter once the data have been validated and stored on the network.Immutability
A public chain need the majority of it's nodes to be in agreement before a record can be come a valid record and then reach consensus. This makes it immutable because it data can't be tamperTransparency
Public chain is a transparent network, because no entity have control very any decision but decision reach with the majority consensus and shares the data to all nodes. It validated transactions with consensus, so these making it more transparent.
Disadvantages
Low Scalability
Because of the multiple nodes that will be verifying and validating transactions, this makes it to process transactions very slow.Very Expensive to Operate
A public blockchain are very expensive to build and maintain, it needs more energy and also needs enough electrical power to achieve network consensusUnknown Validators
In a public chain, you don't know the identity of the validators, so it increases the risk of possible collusion or a 51% attack.Unregulated
A public chain is not been regulated by any entity or government, therefore can easily been use to commit crime and nobody will be able to trace you
CONCLUSION
A public chain remain the best type of blockchain, it gives freedom to users without any access restrictions. It is also applied in majority of use cases because it is open source. Therefore is the best solutions to businesses who needs to integrate blockchain into there business solutions is public chain.