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What is Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin? How Does this Technology Work?
Trends MilkywayBlogs 25-Jun-2021 Comments (120) 52

What is Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin? How Does this Technology Work?

Thanks to the phenomena of Bitcoin, the word ‘Blockchain’ has dropped at least once in almost every one’s ears who has witnessed the ‘Bitcoin Euphoria’ on social media platforms. And given the witnessing by people, this question boils down to everybody ‘What is Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin?’ 

Technology behind Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin

Well, cryptocurrencies are a type of digital currency based on the blockchain technology, and they solely exist in the digitised format. Which means that being a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is not actually a coin, but a piece of computer code. Just like Bitcoin, there are various other cryptocurrencies like litecoin, Ethereum etc. All of these digital currencies are made using the blockchain technology, which now brings us to the question, ‘What is Blockchain?’ 

What Blockchain Technology Does Bitcoin Use?

To sum up the explanation of Blockchain in mere two words, one might use the term ‘distributed ledger’. Although this summing up narrows down the explanation too much, it gives a fair enough idea for understanding. So now to understand it, think of a village where 50 families live, all of them keep the records of land ownership of the village. Whenever someone sells or buys someone’s land, each and every family in the village has to be intimidated to make the update in ownership details in their ledger. Every week, a meeting happens b/w all the family heads and they tally their ledger data with each other, and if all the ledger’s match, then the land transfer is recognised and validated by everyone, giving the transaction a green signal.

Here, instead of the records being centralised to a Patwari, all the village members are individually aware of the land records and hence end up being a big enough vigilante group, nearly impossible to be duped. 

This is one of the factors of Bitcoin, which makes it harder to hack than the centralised system. To give you a clearer picture, think of this example. Imagine a train moving slowly in front of you, where each coach has three details printed on it, the coach number, the train’s name and the previous coach’s number. Now think, what would happen if you remove any random coach from b/w? 

You’ll have to change the details written on all the coaches ahead of it. Now substitute the coaches for a block, and the train as chain, and this is pretty much how the blockchain technology works.

Actually in a blockchain, the data is stored in a block, and the block contains two additional details apart from the data itself. It contains the ‘metadata’ of that block along with metadata of the previous block. And any change made in any given block would change its ‘metadata’ too, formally called a ‘hash code’. And any made to any block will require changes in all the subsequent blocks to be accepted. Plus, for any change like the addition of a new block to be made in the blockchain, a minimum of 51% peers in the network should validate the change. So if it sounds like the village example above, then you have probably understood the crux. Apart from being a currency, blockchain technology has various potential uses apart from its monetisation factor. 

Final Words

So if you are the one who has been searching on the Internet What is Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin?, ‘What is cryptocurrency trading?’, ‘cryptocurrency trading tips’ and ‘cryptocurrency trading in India’, then it would not harm you in learning about the base technology on which your favourite ‘Bitcoin’ runs.

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