Is Blockchain secure?

There are various ways in which blockchain technology addresses security and trust concerns. To begin, all new blocks are kept in a chronological and linear fashion. To put it another way, they’re always appended at the “very end” of the chain. There is a place on the chain called a “height” assigned to each block in Bitcoin’s blockchain. The block’s height had grown to 677,350 blocks as of April 2021

The majority must agree to change the contents of a block after it has been added to the blockchain’s end, else it is exceedingly impossible to go back and do so. This is due to the fact that each block contains a hash, as well as the hash from the block before it and the time stamp described before. When a math function transforms digital data into a string of numbers and letters, a hash code is generated. The hash code changes whenever the data is modified in any way.

See why it’s critical to your security. Think about it this way: suppose a hacker wants to change the blockchain in order to take everyone’s Bitcoin for himself. If they changed their own copy, it would be out of sync with the rest of the group’s copies. Eventually, when everyone compares their copies, this one will stand out and the hacker’s version of the chain will be discarded as fraudulent.

The hacker would have to gain control and make changes to 51% of the blockchain copies in order for their new copy to become the majority copy and hence the agreed-upon chain. Due to various timestamps and hash codes, they would have to redo all the blocks, which would cost a significant amount of money and resources.

Since Bitcoin’s network is so large and growing so quickly, it would be extremely expensive to pull off such a stunt. This would be highly costly, but it’s also unlikely to yield any results. Making such a move would draw attention from other network users, who would witness the substantial changes on the blockchain. Members of the network would then transfer funds to a new, unaffected link in the chain.

When this happens, Bitcoin’s value plummets, making the attack moot because the bad guy now has a worthless item. The same thing would happen if the bad guy attacked the fresh Bitcoin fork. As a result, participating in the network has a much greater economic incentive than assaulting it.

Bitcoin vs. blockchain

The purpose of blockchain is to prevent unauthorized editing of digital data. Two researchers, Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, first proposed blockchain technology in 1991 as a way to ensure the integrity of document timestamps. However, blockchain did not have its first real-world application until over two decades later, in January 2009, with the debut of Bitcoin.

A blockchain serves as the foundation for the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, described it as “a new electronic cash system that is totally peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” in a research paper introducing the digital currency.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that blockchain isn’t just utilized by Bitcoin to keep track of transactions in a public ledger; in theory, it could be used to store any amount of data items. As previously said, this can take the shape of transactions, votes in an election, product inventories, state identifications, and even deeds to homes.

There are numerous blockchain-based projects now underway that aim to use blockchain for purposes other than recording transactions. A noteworthy example is the usage of blockchain in democratic elections as a voting system. Because of blockchain’s immutability, it will be far more difficult to conduct a fake election.

It is possible to implement a voting system in which every person of a country receives a unique coin or token. Voters would contribute tokens or crypto to the wallet addresses of the candidates they want to support, and the wallet addresses would be shared among the candidates. Because of blockchain’s transparency and traceability, there would be no need for human vote counting, and bad actors would have no way to tamper with physical ballots.