This is about my summary of Blockchain — a new term we frequently heard lately — from some articles and videos in the internet. I am not the expert one, but I try to capture some information related to the Blockchain so you will get a further understanding. In my opinion, Blockchain is a new technology approach of how we stored information de-centrally with some block of information in secure way, to keep information consistently and transparency.
Back to a few decades ago, we wrote the daily journal or transaction manually in the book or on paper as an independent document or database. It will be difficult to be replicated at that time, it only can be done by copying through the photocopy machine, carbon paper or re-write. In the trading purposes while we create the purchase order to other parties, we used the carbon paper for duplication, one for our purpose and the other one for other parties. How about the transaction journal calculation or content between parties that enable people to adjust the transaction value for some “cheating” reasons to others. I am not intending to discuss the publishing revolutionary, but I would like to highlight that it was difficult to duplicate the same information using the non-digital way securely and transparently for both parties.
When the personal computer era comes to mass, the technology enabling people to replicate document by copying, sharing and reprinting it in easy way. You can keep the document on storage media like diskette, harddisk — later the storage technology itself expanding to cd, dvd, flashdisk and cloud. Anyway, some organizations even still implementing this personal document or database individually. People keep their document in his or her PC and copying to others needed. The problem is while other people edited the data, and creating many data versions, it is another complicated issues. Another problem is while the people do not want to share the data, the organization like being “locked’ by this person.
The client-server technology give some solutions to give access-role to the data stored in centralized database, giving permissions to users in the organization who can do with data access management — to insert, update, delete, display, managing data versions and so on. The major player in IT industries, like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft developing their own ERP, MRP, SCM, HRIS and other applications based on this client-server architecture.
Referring back to the late 1990, Napster popularized the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing for ebook, mp3, movies, games to allow users to download large amounts of data without incurring the dramatic costs for bandwidth inherent when providing just a single source. They used a central server-based model, may be classified as the first generation of P2P systems. Microsoft also adopting this P2P concept to distribute the Windows update. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_file_sharing)
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided. Emerging collaborative P2P systems are going beyond the era of peers doing similar things while sharing resources, and are looking for diverse peers that can bring in unique resources and capabilities to a virtual community thereby empowering it to engage in greater tasks beyond those that can be accomplished by individual peers, yet that are beneficial to all the peers.
The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. In such social contexts, peer-to-peer as a meme refers to the egalitarian social networking that has emerged throughout society, enabled by Internet technologies in general. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer)
The social media started as new revolution era in the early 2000 for how we interact to social network, when it was started Friendster as the most popular social online friendship. Today, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin are become the major player in the social media based on specific interest. The social network activities endorse the technology to the wider social world community to become an open-society network, which mean information transparency to everyone.
As a “transparency” word become a major standard terminology in the way we interact on ecommerce system, the blockchain comes to fulfil the gap in the unknown inter-person utilizing the P2P and complicated encryption algorithm to secure information by duplicating data into distributed architecture. The confirmed information (data) will be replicated to other peers as a chained information to be locked each other. This is what I called the shifting paradigm of storing information from individual, centralized to distributed architecture.
The first distributed blockchain was then conceptualised by an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented the following year as a core component of the digital currency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions. Through the use of a peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server, a blockchain database is managed autonomously. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain)
People - Process - System 