Emerging Trends, Techniques, and Integration in Computer Science
- 1. Emerging Trends Block chain Technology
- 2. Digital ledger of transactions Block: Piece of information made up of data Blocks store information about transactions like the date, time, and dollar amount of your most recent purchase from Amazon, It also has the hash of the previous block Block also contains all nature of data such as medical records, voting records, smart contacts, land records The hash is the unique identity of a block, e.g. finger print of a person Every block contains the hash of the previous block, this is what creates a chain of interconnected blocks, thus the technology is called blockchain Every time a new block is created, a timestamp is added to all the transactions
- 3. How It works Example, Jane wants to buy a house, she buys a house that she likes and decides to buy it, when she buys a house, the seller has to sign a document that says jane now owns the house. Jane also has to provide proof that when she bought the house, the owner signed the house into her name which Jane is also given. In essence, the house has to have proof of previous ownership all the way to the beginning
- 4. How It works..Cont.. Blockchain works similarly, for each unit of the chain, there is cryptographically verifiable chain of the history of ownership. In block chain, the registry is distributed to everybody This means that everyone can verify at any time, how many units are in circulation and who owns them, and what the history of their ownership is Transactions are verified by a consensus of multiple users
- 5. Cont… Because the information is stored on various computers, its almost impossible for anyone to delete or change the information without the user being notified The blockchain therefore helps to securely store and validate sensitive information It establishes trust Reduces cost Improves speed Enhances productivity
- 6. History of Block Chain The underlying technology behind cryptocurrency is the block chain It allows every client in the network to reach consensus without ever having to trust each other The idea behind block chain technology was described as early as 1991 when research scientists Stewart Harber and W. Stornetta introduced a computationally practical solution for time-stamping digital documents so that they count be backdated or tampered with The system used a cryptographically secured chain of blocks to store the time-stamped documents In 1992, Merkle trees were incorporated to the design, making it more efficient by allowing several documents to be collected into one block.
- 7. Cont…. However, this technology went unused and the patent lapsed in 2004, four years before the inception of bitcoin. In 2004, computer scientist and cryptographic activist Hal Finney (Harold Thomas Finney introduced a system called RPoW, Resuable Proof of Work The system worked by receiving a non-exchangeable or a non-fungibale Hashcash based proof of work token In return created an RSA-signed token that could then be transferred from person to person. Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) is a well known public key or asymmetric cryptographic algorithm. It protects sensitive data through encryption and decryption using a private and public key RPoW solved the double spending problem by keeping the ownership of tokens registered on a trusted server that was designed to allow users throughout the world to verify its correctness and integrity in real time
- 8. Cont….. RPoW can be considered as an early prototype and a significant early step in the history In late 2008, a white paper introducing a decentralised P2P electronic cash system called Bitcoin was posted to a cryptography mailing list by a person or group using pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto based on the hascash proof of work algorithm but rather than using a hardware trusted computing function like RPoW, The double spending protection in Bitcoin was provided by a decentralised P2P Protocol for tracking and verifying the transactions In short, Bitcoins are mined for a reward using the PRoW mechanism by individual miners and then verified by the decentralised nodes in the network In 2009, Bitcoin came to existence when the first bitcoin block was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, which had a reward of 50 bitcoins
- 9. Cont….. The first recipient of Bitcoin was Hal Finney, he received 10 Bitcoins from Satoshi Nakamoto in the world’s bitcoin transaction on 12-Jan-2009. In 2023, Vitalik Buterin, a programmer and a co-founder of the Bitcoin Magazine stated that bitcoin needed a scripting language for building decentralised applications Failing to gain an agreement in the community, Vitalik started the development of a new blockchain-based distributed computing platform, Ethereum, that featured a scripting functionality, called smart contracts. Smart Contracts are programmes or scripts that are deployed and executed on the Ethereum block chain. They can be used for example to make a transaction if certain conditions are met. They are written in scientific programming languages and compiled into bytecodes, which a decentralised Turing-complete virtual machine called Ethereum virtual machine EVM can then read and execute
- 10. Cont…. Developers are also able to create and publish applications that run inside Ethereum blockchain These applications are usually referred to as DApps (decentralised applications) and there already 100s of DApps running in the Ethereum blockchain, including social media platforms, gambling applications, and financial exchanges The crypto currency of Ethereum is called Ether, it can be transferred between accounts and is used to pay the fees for the computational power used when executing smart contracts Today blockchain technology is gaining a lot of mainstream attention and is already used in a variety of applications, not limited to cryptocurrencies.