Blockchain Technology: Industry Uses, Background, Purpose, and Value

Contemporary Issues in
Digital and
Business Technologies

1
Contents
INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................................2
Background of its development.........................................................................................................2
Purpose of this technology.................................................................................................................3
Industry uses of Blockchain...............................................................................................................3
Value/Contribution that this technology offers..................................................................................4
CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES......................................................................................................................................5
INTRODUCTION
Digital currencies have evolved into practice with the beginning of 21st century. Blockchain is
a similar technology which is a continuously growing record called blocks that are secured
and linked with cryptography (Swan, 2015). Each block has a cryptographic hash of the last

2
block, transaction data and a timestamp. Data becomes inherently resistant to modification by
designing a block chain. It is a distributed ledger which is open and can record transactions
among two different parties efficiently and in a permanent and verifiable manner. For
utilising distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by the peer-peer network that
as a whole gets adhered to a protocol for internode communication and authenticating new
blocks. When a data is recorded once in a provided block then it cannot be changed
retroactively without the changes of all the subsequent blocks that need collusion of the
network majority. With a high Byzantine fault tolerance, block chain exemplifies a
computing network that is distributed.
A consensus has therefore being achieved through a blockchain and this is the reason why it
is more suitable for recording of medical records or events or other activities of records
management. Some of the common examples are transaction processing, food traceability,
identity management, voting or documenting provenance etc. It was invented in 2008 by
Japanese scientist Satoshi Nakamoto for utilising it in crypto currency bitcoin as its public
transaction ledger (Zyskind and Nathan, 2015). With the invention of Block chain it was the
first digital currency that solves the double spacing.
Background of its development
Block chain technology came into existence from the emergence of bitcoin from the year
2009 when a revolutionary paper by Satoshi Nakamoto was produced. Actually the work four
year back when Hal Finney produced the concept of “reusable proofs of work” a system that
utilised ideas from b-money along with computationally difficult Hashcash puzzles by Adam
Back to generate the concept for a crypto currency. It was running on the centralised trusted
backend system. Till the year 2017 it has become one of the most widely used
cryptocurrency. In 2014 bitcoin block chain file size reached 20GB, which reached to 30 GB
in 2015. In 2016-17 it reached to 50GB to 100G. Blockchain 2.0 has many kinds of new
applications where the users can exchange values without powerful intermediaries acting as
arbiters of information and money (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016).
Purpose of this technology
The major purpose of the blockchain technology is to create a secure digital identity
reference. The major thing behind the development of blockchain was to provide peer to peer
electronic cash system that helps in enabling online cyrptocurrency payments (Pilkington,
2016). Since there were many lags in the online electronic systems hence this technology