Navigating the Promises and Hurdles of Blockchain Technology: A Journey through Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Everyone has come across the buzz word of the industry “Blockchain”. Today, Blockchain and the crypto-currencies have become parallel platforms where people have started performing their monetary/non-monetary transactions. It is a very popular technology that rules almost every sector in foreign country, but not approved fully by Indian government. Blockchain is the collection of blocks connected in a linear list fashion [1]. Each block encloses its own data, also holds the hash of the previous block which ties a new block to the previous one unlike linked list. If one of the blocks is removed from the blockchain, the entire chain will collapse because of loss of connectivity. Cryptography in hands with computer science ensures that nobody can change the data in blockchain network. Once information is added to the blockchain, it is impossible to remove or edit. The immutable nature makes the blockchain to serve as a trustworthy database of information. Once validated by the network’s consensus algorithm(s), these blocks are added to an existing sequential chain of cryptographic hash-linked blocks, to ensure the integrity of the data in blockchain [2]. Hence this paper brings about the structure of blockchain, the creation of blocks, the data structure-Merkle tree to store the transactions, the distributed consensus algorithms to achieve agreement among the nodes, the popular use-cases and applications of blockchain.