Amandeep Singh

Blockchains are incredibly popular nowadays. But what is a blockchain? How do they work, what problems do they solve and how can they be used?  Like the name indicates, a blockchain is a chain of blocks that contains information. This technique was originally described in 1991 by a group of researchers and was originally intended to timestamp digital documents so that it’s not possible to backdate them or to tamper with them. Almost like a notary. However it went by mostly unused until it was adapted by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 to create the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin.  A blockchain is a distributed ledger that is completely open to anyone. They have an interesting property: once some data has been recorded inside a blockchain, it becomes very difficult to change it.  So how does that work?  Well, let’s take a closer look at a block. Each block contains some data, the hash of the block and the hash of the previous block. The data that is stored inside...

Say there’s a coin that’s currently worth hundreds of U.S. dollars, but it’s not made of gold, or platinum, or any precious metal. In fact, it’s not the kind of coin you can hold in your hand or stick in a piggy bank. It’s a digital currency, which means it only exists electronically. I’m talking about bitcoin .                                                              Bitcoin Bitcoin doesn’t work like most money. It isn’t attached to a state or government,so it doesn’t have a central issuing authority or regulatory body. Basically, that means there’s no organization deciding when to make more bitcoins, figuring out how many to produce, keeping track of where they are, or investigating fraud. So how does bitcoin work as a currency, or have any value at all? Well, bitcoin wouldn’t exist without a whole network of people ...