Wat is een blockchain?
De kern van crypto's zoals Bitcoin en Ethereum is een technologie die de blockchain wordt genoemd. Op het meest fundamentele niveau is een blockchain een lijst met transacties die iedereen kan bekijken en verifiëren. De Bitcoin-blockchain bevat bijvoorbeeld een dossier waarin staat geregistreerd wanneer iemand bitcoins heeft verzonden of ontvangen. Met crypto's en de benodigde blockchaintechnologie kunnen gebruikers online waarde overdragen zonder tussenkomst van een bank of creditcardmaatschappij.
Stelt u zich eens een wereldwijd, open alternatief voor voor elke financiële dienst die u vandaag gebruikt, toegankelijk met weinig meer dan een smartphone en internetverbinding.
De lijst met transacties in de blockchain is van essentieel belang voor de meeste crypto's, omdat deze betalingen tussen onbekenden mogelijk maakt zonder dat een externe partij, zoals een bank, de transactie hoeft te controleren.
Blockchaintechnologie is daarnaast interessant omdat deze ook buiten crypto kan worden gebruikt. Blockchains worden gebruikt om medisch onderzoek te doen, de nauwkeurigheid van medische dossiers te verbeteren, toeleveringsketens te stroomlijnen en nog veel meer.
Wat zijn een aantal voordelen van blockchains?
Ze zijn internationaal: Dit betekent dat crypto's snel en goedkoop over de hele wereld kunnen worden verzonden.
Ze zijn open: Elke transactie op crypto-netwerken wordt openbaar gepubliceerd in de vorm van de blockchain. Iedereen kan de transacties bekijken. Dit laat geen ruimte voor de manipulatie van transacties, wijzigingen van het aanbod of tussentijdse aanpassingen van de regels. De software die aan deze valuta's ten grondslag ligt, is gratis en open source, zodat iedereen de code kan bekijken.
Key questions
What’s the main advantage blockchains have over the old financial system?
Think about how much of your financial life takes place online, from shopping to investing – and how every single one of those transactions requires a bank or a credit card company or payment processor like Paypal in the middle of it. Blockchains allow for those transactions to happen without a middleman, and without the added costs and complexity that come with them.
Is Bitcoin a blockchain?
Bitcoin is a form of digital money. And the underlying technology that makes it possible is a blockchain.
How many kinds of blockchains are there?
Thousands, from the ones that power Bitcoin, Litecoin, Tezos, and countless other digital currencies to an increasing number that have nothing to do with digital money
Disadvantages of Blockchain Technology
Energy Consumption: Many blockchain networks, especially those using proof-of-work consensus like Bitcoin, consume a substantial amount of energy, which raises environmental concerns.
Scalability Issues: As more transactions are added to the blockchain, the size of the database grows significantly, leading to slower transaction times and higher fees.
Regulatory Uncertainty: The legal and regulatory environment for blockchain and cryptocurrencies is still evolving, which can create uncertainty and risk for users and businesses.
Hoe werkt een blockchain?
Picture a chain you might use for a ship’s anchor. But in this case, every link on the chain is a chunk of information that contains transaction data. At the top of the chain you see what happened today, and as you move down the chain you see older and older transactions. And if you follow it all the way down to the anchor sitting at the bottom of the harbor? You’ll have seen every single transaction in the history of that cryptocurrency. Which gives the blockchain powerful security advantages: it’s an open, transparent record of a cryptocurrency’s entire history. If anyone tries to manipulate a transaction it will cause the link to break, and the entire network will see what happened. That, in a nutshell, is blockchain explained.
Another way people often describe the blockchain is that it’s a ledger (sometimes you’ll hear the terms ‘distributed ledger’ or ‘immutable ledger’), that is similar to the balance sheet of a bank. Like a bank’s ledger, the blockchain tracks all the money flowing into, out of, and through the network.
But unlike a bank’s books, a crypto blockchain isn’t maintained by any individual or organization, including banks and governments. In fact it isn’t centralized at all. Instead, it is secured by a large peer-to-peer network of computers running open-source software. The network is constantly checking and securing the accuracy of the blockchain.
Where does new cryptocurrency come from? Every so often – around every ten minutes in the case of Bitcoin – a new chunk of transaction information (or a new block) is added to the chain of existing information. In exchange for contributing their computing power to maintaining the blockchain, the network rewards participants with a small amount of digital currency.
A crypto blockchain is distributed across the digital currency’s entire network. No company, country, or third party is in control of it; and anyone can participate.
The network is constantly checking and securing the accuracy of the blockchain.
Key questions
How do you send and receive money over a blockchain?
The cryptocurrency network assigns each user a unique ‘address,’ which is made up of a private key and a public key. Anyone can send you money via your public key, which is akin to an email address. When you want to spend your money, you use your private key, which is basically your password, to digitally ‘sign’ transactions. The easiest way to manage your cryptocurrency is via software called a wallet, which you can get via an exchange like Coinbase.
Wie heeft de blockchain uitgevonden?
A person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper online explaining the principles behind a new kind of digital money called Bitcoin in late 2008. Every cryptocurrency since is an evolution of the ideas laid out in that paper.
Nakamoto’s goal was to create digital money that would make online transactions between two strangers anywhere in the world possible without requiring a third party like a credit card company or a payment processor like Paypal in the middle.
This required a system that would eliminate a thorny issue called the ‘double spending’ problem, where a person might use the same money more than once. The solution is a network that is constantly verifying the movement of Bitcoin. That network is the blockchain.
Every Bitcoin transaction is stored and verified by a global network of computers beyond the control of any person, company, or country.
The database that holds all of that information is called the blockchain. Bitcoins are ‘mined’ via that huge, decentralized (also known as peer-to-peer) network of computers, which are also constantly verifying and securing the accuracy of the blockchain. In exchange for contributing their computing power to the blockchain, miners are rewarded with small amounts of cryptocurrency.
Every single bitcoin transaction is reflected on the ledger, with new information periodically gathered together in a “block,” which is added to all the blocks that came before.
The miners’ collective computing power is used to ensure the accuracy of the ever-growing ledger. Bitcoin can’t exist separately from the blockchain; each new bitcoin is recorded on it, as is each subsequent transaction with all existing coins.
In exchange for contributing their computing power to the blockchain, miners are rewarded with small amounts of cryptocurrency.
What's the future of blockchains?
The blockchain idea has turned out to be a platform that a huge range of applications can be built on top of. It’s still a new and rapidly developing technology, but many experts have described blockchain’s potential to change the way we live and work as being similar to the potential public internet protocols like HTML had in the early days of the World Wide Web.
The Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin blockchains work in a very similar way to the original Bitcoin blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain is a further evolution of the distributed ledger idea, because unlike the Bitcoin blockchain it’s not solely designed to manage a digital money. (That said Ethereum is a cryptocurrency and certainly can be used to send value to another person). Think of the Ethereum blockchain more like a powerful and highly flexible computing platform that allows coders to easily build all kinds of applications leveraging the blockchain.
For example, imagine a charity that wants to send money to a thousand people every day for a year. With Ethereum, that would only take a few lines of code. Or maybe you’re a video game developer that wants to create items like swords and armor that can be traded outside of the game itself? Ethereum is designed to do that, too.
