The blockchain is a distributed ledger that runs on top of conventional systems. These elements include storage, communication, and computation.   Storage Data can be stored directly in a blockchain, and with this fact it achieves decentralization. However, a significant disadvantage of this approach is that a blockchain is not suitable for storing large amounts […]

There are systems that pre-date blockchain and Bitcoin, including BitTorrent and the Gnutella file-sharing system, which to a certain degree could be classified as decentralized, but due to a lack of any incentivization mechanism, participation from the community gradually decreased.   There wasn’t any incentive to keep the users interested in participating in the growth […]

Two methods for achieving decentralization are: disintermediation and competition.   Disintermediation The concept of disintermediation can be explained with the aid of an example. Imagine that you want to send money to a friend in another country.   You go to a bank, which, for a fee, will transfer your money to the bank in […]

The basic idea of decentralization is to distribute the control and authority to the peripheries of an organization instead of one central body being in full control of the organization.   The benefits for organizations in following decentralization are: increased efficiency, faster decision making, better motivation, and a reduced burden on top management.   Decentralization […]

The CAP theorem, also known as Brewer’s theorem, was introduced by Eric Brewer in 1998 as a conjecture. It states that any distributed system cannot have consistency, availability, and partition tolerance simultaneously.   Consistency is a property that ensures that all nodes in a distributed system have a single, current, and identical copy of the […]

Consensus is a process of achieving agreement between distrusting nodes on the final state of data. To achieve consensus, different algorithms are used. The process of attaining agreement on a common state or value among multiple nodes despite the failure of some nodes is known as distributed consensus.   Consensus is the backbone of a […]

In this article we will discuss different types of blockchain based on its evolution and usage. The categorization of blockchains is illustrated in the figure below:   Distributed Ledgers A distributed ledger is a shared database. All blockchains technically fall under distributed ledgers. But, all distributed ledgers are not blockchains. A critical difference between a […]