The Different Uses Of Blockchain

Blockchain technology is a relatively new and exciting technological advancement, although it has been a known technology for a number of years, it has not received much attention until recently through cryptocurrency and Non-Fungible Tokens, which for a brief period took the internet by storm

Finance

The most common and well-known use of blockchain technology is its use as a ledger for cryptocurrencies. In the world of cryptocurrency, this ledger stores all information and transactions It stores the solved mathematical equations that people have solved and then distributes a financial reward to the solvers This stored data is immutable (cannot be changed) and is verified by all other machines on the network to agree that the data is correct, in order to prevent bad actors from stealing money or faking the work to gain money All information is stored on the blockchain, which makes it traceable, however, a user’s identity is hidden through the use of anonymous identifiers such as random numbers to identify users instead of their real names, although this does mean that if someone links both the numbers and the real name then the identity becomes revealed and cannot be hidden without a new identifier.

Real Estate

In a scenario such as the transfer of ownership of property, blockchain technology would be very useful as it will show who owns the property, which can also be traced back to who they bought the property from and the property’s several other previous owners It could also show the previous buy and sell prices to help estimate the property value. This would be a very secure method of storing all this data, as all input data cannot be removed or changed, while making it readily available to all those that would need it, such as estate agents.

NFTs

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are commonly used as ways to own the rights to digital art as the ledger records all ledgers and any information cannot be changed, meaning that the blockchain shows verifiable proof that the user owns that digital art, and only the buyer will have access to the verifiable original piece of digital art

Data Storage

Due to the decentralised nature of blockchain technology, it would help make data storage far more resilient against attacks. If an attacker gained access to the network and attempted to take, delete or replace any data then all other machines on the network would have to authorise that request, and the attacker would be very hard-pressed to gain control over more than half of the machines on the network. In the event that that was even managed by the attackers, then the victim’s data would still be intact so long as it remained on at least one machine out of the many on the network, as this one machine would be used to entirely rebuild the network. In the event that the attackers managed to steal data, it may be encrypted, which means they may also require an encryption key in order to gain access to the actual information This key may be kept on a completely separate device, such as someone's memory stick, which would likely be completely inaccessible to the attacker

DDoS Prevention

One form of attack that is becoming increasingly common is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. In this attack, the attackers attempt to overwhelm a network by flooding it with server requests or data This may result in increased loading times for users that operate on this network, or even lead to server crashes that render the network non-functional. This form of attack is typically used to weaken and distract the victims in preparation to further penetrate and exploit the network Blockchain technology can be used to counter this form of attack by creating a network that is simply too big to be effectively attacked. DDoS attacks rely on overwhelming the hardware of a network, but with blockchain technology, anyone and everyone have the capability to host a part of a network, so not only would attackers struggle to pin a target (they would need the IP address of every node), but they would have to overwhelm the potentially millions of machines powering the network

Written by Daniel Martin Cyber