Good evening dear friends!

I still remember the month of September 2018, when I started on Steemit my journey through the world of blockchain. At that time I understood absolutely nothing about the topic and I spent several months looking the other way, as if wanting to dodge the topic, limiting myself to posting, commenting and curating content.

Months later I started to feel curious about this new and promising topic, so I began to study and prepare myself to understand, in search of personal growth.

I still remember how complicated it was to understand this new technology, its emergence, the problems it comes to solve and the ecosystem in general. At first it was very discouraging because I did not understand the terms used or the usefulness of these chains.

Little by little I began to understand and gain perspective on this reality that is here to stay and to transform our lives.

Remembering all this, I decided to start writing about the subject in a simple way so that those who are beginning to walk this path can understand in an easier way what blockchains are about and their main characteristics, in such a way that it awakens their curiosity and encourages them to deepen their understanding of the concepts and generate their own perspective on the subject.

Nothing more important in life than knowing where we are moving, this will surely help us to open doors and seek new opportunities.

Source

Today I will try to share with you in a simple language my knowledge about Blockchain.

What is a Blockchain, where does it come from, what was the first Blockchain application?
In order to understand Blockchain, we must begin by understanding Bitcoin (first Blockchain application) and what problems it came to solve regarding FIAT money (physical currency, dollar, pesos, bolivars, etc).

In 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is unknown and is supposed to be a group of people, sent to a mailing list to personalities of the crypto world the white paper (roadmap) of BITCOIN.

In this roadmap he mentions the benefits of BITCOIN, among which we can mention:

Eliminate intermediaries, since banks and financial institutions will no longer be required to carry out transactions.
Eliminates double spending, since transactions are person-to-person.
Eliminates the need for a central entity, eliminating the problems of corruption and fraud and the uncontrolled issuance of currency to cover the sidereal costs incurred by countries.
Bitcoin was the first application of Blockchain technology, and this concept is embraced by the cryptographic community.

Source

The Bitcoin white paper says nothing about Blockchain, but this technology, which originated in the early 1990s when Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta did the first work on an encrypted blockchain, only came to prominence with the emergence of Bitcoin in 2008.

A blockchain contains information, is an immutable, decentralized, secure, open to innovation, among other characteristics, and is replicated on multiple computers.

The blockchain is a single record, consensual and distributed in several nodes (computers) of a network. We can also define the blockchain as a digital ledger where each transaction is recorded.

These transactions are stored in encrypted blocks through a Hash and where each of the blocks contains information of the block that precedes and precedes it, which makes each of the blocks are interconnected.

Source

This Hash is nothing more than the name of the block which is unique and unrepeatable and to finish understanding it would be like the fingerprint for humans.

All these interrelated blocks form the Blockchain and it has the following characteristics:

• The blockchain is distributed among all the participants in the system, whether they are called nodes or miners.
• Decentralization: in each of the miners, and if any of them wants to modify the information of a certain block, they need the consensus of 51% of them to make the change, which makes it secure.
• It provides stable and immutable information, since decentralization makes it impossible for anyone to commit fraud. If one of the miners tries to modify a block, it is quickly detected by the rest and that copy of the chain is invalidated.
• It is a highly secure system because if any of the miners loses or breaks his copy of the chain, the same copy is in the other miners.
• The information contained in the blockchain is verifiable, as it can be traced through the blockchain which is public.

The Blockchain is a relatively new technology and on which there is a lot of development at present and it brings to humanity a great potential to make life easier for human beings as it could be used with many, many functions that would simplify the life of all of us eliminating possible dishonest behaviors.

In what other areas could we use Blockchain technology?

The possibility of using this type of technology in extremely wide. Some examples would be:

• In the field of health, it could serve to store our medical records and if tomorrow we have a health problem, abroad, to know it would be as simple as consulting the blockchain.

• Keeping records of deeds and title deeds of assets.

• Food traceability, for example to verify if a food is organic or not, or if it respected the cold chain.

All this is possible because Blockchain allows to verify, validate, track and store all kinds of information.

Among its main disadvantages we can mention scalability, which is the inconvenience that arises when several users use the network and it ends up saturating.

There are also problems in achieving decentralization, which would ensure honesty, security and immutability of data.

Thus begins my series of publications in which I will try to share with you all the knowledge that I have been able to learn and I understand that it can be of value to you to begin to take perspective of the value of this technology and why it promises changes that will help improve our quality of life.

In future posts I will talk about the Bitcoin white paper, with a brief analysis, and we will continue to delve into this wonderful world of cryptocurrency.

We need to educate and educate ourselves because here is the future of finance.