Blockchain Technology

Blockchain- the technology behind the well-known currency application called Bitcoin, is one of the most talked about technology across several industries, most notably Finance and Supply-chain.

It redefines the way enterprises store and manages their data lifecycle, and has the potential to revolutionize the way Business is done today.

Blockchain technology is also called the Digital ledger technology as it is after all a distributed repository of ledger entries.

To put it very simply, Blockchain is a data-structure, very similar to a linked list, where every new block of data is cryptographically linked to its predecessor.

A very simple visual representation of Blockchain is as follows

Here we see that a block of data has a unique hash which is the address (link) to the next block. Now this linked list is copied to all the peers of the network, making it distributed.

The below representation of Blockchain makes it easier to visualize it in the enterprise context, where it will be used to reduce frictions in existing processes. Intimidating terms of Nonce and Merkle Root in the below diagram, will be explained in the subsequent sections.