A Brief Guide to Bitcoin – Based on Blockchain

The first thing that comes to our mind when we think of Blockchain is “BitCoin”.

Bitcoin is based on Distributed ledger and it is the first Blockchain.

What is Distributed Ledger?

Distributed Ledger is a kind of a database or an agreement in digital format that is spread and shared across regions. There will not be any administrator to maintain or share the Distributed Ledger. Now we will define Bitcoin-based on the definition of Distributed Ledger. “Bitcoin network keeps the track of transactions and Balances and also keeps track of the unit of value of the currency that we transact.”

From the above definition, we can conclude that Bitcoin has two important concepts.

a)      Bitcoin Network: This network is based on high-performance computers which are called “Miners” which keeps track of the transactions.

Miners are used to verifying the transactions and once verified, they get recorded in the Blockchain in the form of Blocks.  

b)      Bitcoin Currency: It is defined as the “Unit of Value” that we use on the network.

It is completely digital and portable, divisible and irreversible

For example, if we are having a consortium or federation of World’s top 10 financial institutes and out which it was decided in the code or an Algorithm that if a transaction or a block or the decision is voted or verified by more than 5 institutes, then only the transaction or block should get added to the Blockchain and if not voted by more than 5 institutes, it should not be added to the Blockchain.

In this type of Blockchain, there is a way of achieving things much faster and you also have more than one single point of failures which in a way also protects the whole ecosystem against a single point of failure which is very critical. You can learn more about Blockchain to know about Bitcoin. These days so many Blockchain certification or training materials are available. Anyone can gain the required knowledge.

Example: R3

In this type of blockchain:

·         People of the consortium or federation can run a full node and start mining.

·         People of the consortium or federation can make transactions or decisions or both on the Blockchain.

·         Members of the consortium or federation can review or audit or can do both on the blockchain in a Blockchain explorer. 

Blockchain Explorer:

Blockchain is a Browser for Blockchain. These are mainly used for tracking the Blockchain transactions.

These Browsers not only provide the tracking information of the Bitcoin or Blockchain transactions but also provide other valuable information about Blockchain.

 Some of them are as below,

1.         Blocks Feed: We can see the recently added Blocks to the Blockchain
2.        Address: We can see the receiving address and change the address of a Bitcoin
3.        Transactions: We can use the Blockchain Explorers to have data for the largest Bitcoin transactions are done in a day or given the point of time.
4.        Status of Mempool: We can see the status of Mempool where we can see the status of transactions that are not confirmed along with the details of the transactions.