How will you explain Blockchain technology to a 10-year old? - letsdiskuss
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Sher Singh

Social Activist | Posted on | Science-Technology


How will you explain Blockchain technology to a 10-year old?


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Entrepreneur | Posted on


Imagine you went to the bank to deposit INR 10,000. The banker typed something on the computer and took your money. However, even after 2 days, the deposit isn’t reflecting on your account.

What happened? Why hasn’t your money come yet in the account? Did the banker ***** you up? Did he even make any entry of the deposit? Is the bank’s system flawed?
There’s no way to answer these questions. You will now have to make a formal complaint and go through all the hassle to prove you deposited the money and that banker messed it up.
Now imagine there was an open ledger that you can check immediately to confirm the transaction. You went to the bank to deposit INR 10,000. The banker typed something on the computer and took your money. Now you shoot your browser, visit a website and see a live ledger to find whether the banker has made the entry or not—Is the deposit a success in your account or not.
This is the basic idea of Blockchain technology— to make everything transparent where a person can see the transactions data and time live (without crossing the borderlines of one’s privacy rights).
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The blockchain is a growing list of records. Every successful transaction made gets added to this list. Each transaction, that gets summarized in blocks, contains a hash (a mathematical algorithm) of the previous block. Meaning, it is virtually impenetrable or can’t be changed in a way that to change a transaction (or record or block), one would require to change all the following blocks that contain its original hash—and this is not possible without getting a consensus of the whole network.
So, once a block has made an entry in the blockchain, the transaction becomes transparent and unaltered. This whole setup, evidently, can make any and every process highly see-through, which cam help point-out corruptions, leakages and boost transaction speed. For instance, if the government introduces a social scheme and pass on the benefits to the end public, the moment it transfers the benefit to the beneficiaries, that will be recorded on the blockchain. So, if the end user didn’t get the benefit even when the government has granted him that, the problem can easily be fixed by holding the middlemen accountable.
This is why various industries and niches are striding to take up the blockchain technology. In our country, SBI and even the government has said that they will soon be testing blockchain technology.
Now, in the same context of what is blockchain, you will come across the term Merkel tree. Merkel tree is an integral component of blockchain technology that collects all the transactions in a block by creating a digital footprint of the whole set of transactions. This enables users to verify whether a transaction is included in a block or not. Merkel tree is one of the many factors that separate the blockchain database from the traditional database.
block chain
Now, there are 3 broad types of blockchain:
· Private blockchain- Created and managed by an individual or one organization. They take the sole decision of how to handle the blockchain.
· Public blockchain- Like Bitcoin; it is handled by no one. Decision-making is done by several decentralized consensus mechanisms.
· Consortium blockchain- Held by a group of people or organizations, like companies in the finance industry, who work collectively to maintain the blockchain.
Irrespective of the type, the core principle of blockchain technology is to promote transparency and decentralization. Even those who have private blockchain, they promote transparency; else they would have gone with the traditional database management.
These are all the basics of the blockchain. Hopefully, according to your question, this 10-year old that I am explaining to is slightly smart enough to understand the explanation. If not, wait for him to get to at least 15. There’s no reason why a 10-year old should know about the blockchain.


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