Blockchain Technology 101

Let’s look at the explanation one more time.

“The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” -Don & Alex Tapscott, Blockchain Revolution.

Let’s break that down.

At the end of the day, a blockchain is just a ledger — it keeps track of things that happened. If you think about it — it’s actually really boring. It sounds like something that only passionate accountants would find interesting and talk about at a pub. But clearly this ledger has much greater ramifications. What makes it so fascinating and significant is that this ledger is anonymous, tamperproof, distributed, encrypted and usually public. This was literally impossible until now.

A blockchain is just a ledger.

So What’s The Big Deal?

Let’s take bitcoin as an example — If it wasn’t for the blockchain technology, bitcoin could not exist because it’s a decentralized digital currency, where there is no central bank or administrator. There is no person or entity making sure that when X sends 1 bitcoin to Y, X can’t also send the same 1 bitcoin to Z. The blockchain network allows users that don’t know each other and don’t trust each other to have peer-to-peer transactions without an intermediary. The blockchain network itself verifies each transaction and keeps track of everything that has ever happened. It’s public. It’s secure. It’s distributed. It’s anonymous (technically pseudonymous). No one can go back and change anything.

Blockchain is the protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledge of value.

Let’s Dive A Bit Deeper Into The Bitcoin Blockchain

It’s public — There are no secrets on the bitcoin blockchain. Every single transaction is public. That’s right. You can go to a website like Block Explorer or BlockCypher or others to look at every transaction that has ever taken place.

— There are no secrets on the bitcoin blockchain. Every single transaction is public. That’s right. You can go to a website like Block Explorer or BlockCypher or others to look at every transaction that has ever taken place. It’s distributed — Not in one central location. A copy of the entire bitcoin network is stored and synced across the bitcoin blockchain network.

— Not in one central location. A copy of the entire bitcoin network is stored and synced across the bitcoin blockchain network. It’s anonymous — Technically, it’s pseudonymous. It doesn’t have your name attached to it. It’s an alias. (Monero is the only cryptocurrency that I know of that claims to be truly anonymous.)

— Technically, it’s pseudonymous. It doesn’t have your name attached to it. It’s an alias. (Monero is the only cryptocurrency that I know of that claims to be truly anonymous.) It’s incorruptible — Any bad actor (say, Nicolas Cage) acting alone is powerless. To take over the network, an attacker would have to control more than 50 per cent of its total computing power.

— Any bad actor (say, Nicolas Cage) acting alone is powerless. To take over the network, an attacker would have to control more than 50 per cent of its total computing power. It’s cryptographically secure — This one is a doozy. IBM explained this best. “The records on a blockchain are secured through cryptography. Network participants have their own private keys that are assigned to the transactions they make and act as a personal digital signature. If a record is altered, the signature will become invalid and the peer network will know right away that something has happened. Early notification is crucial to preventing further damage.”

Sorry. I can tell you’re dozing off.

Long story short —

The blockchain will have a much bigger impact on the world than the internet, because the blockchain technology does for trust what the internet did for information. That’s why blockchain is a “new distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.”

Let me show you rather than talk about it, and let’s move beyond the bitcoin example, shall we?

Real-world Examples of Blockchain Technology

Remember the blockchain is an excellent way to keep track of anything of value. It really is that versatile. It’s being used today to track ☕ coffee beans to digital diplomas 🏫.

☕ 1. Coffee Beans on the Blockchain

Coffee farmers are always at the short end of the stick in the notoriously complex global supply chain. Currently, only 2% of the added value of every cup of coffee ends up in the pockets of coffee producers.

Moyee Coffee is using blockchain technology to bring transparency to this mess.

The first ‘block’ in the chain has already begun and you can follow real-time payments to Ethiopian farmers for their coffee cherries. This is nothing less than a revolution and the start of a project that will bring an unprecendented level of transparency in a profoundly unfair industry. The bext360 blockchain project will mean by next year all Moyee’s coffee will be fully blockchain-traceable from the washing station in Ethiopia to our retail and office customers in Europe.

For consumers, this provides “unprecedented levels of transparency around origin and quality; and allowing, for the first time, a coffee drinker in Europe to pull up this data and verify exactly where their coffee was sourced.”

☞ Read full story here: https://medium.com/@MoyeeCoffeeIRL/worlds-first-blockchain-coffee-project-cd04fff9e510

☞ Listen to the Innovation Show Podcast with Moyee Coffee.