Mastering Blockchain: Deeper insights into decentralization, cryptography, Bitcoin, and popular Blockchain frameworks

by Imran Bashir

Blockchain has once again given this vision of decentralization to the world and now concerted efforts are being made to harness this technology and gain the benefits that it can provide. Computation Decentralization of computing or processing is achieved by a blockchain technology such as Ethereum, where smart contracts with embedded business logic can run on the network. Other blockchain technologies also provide similar processing layer platforms where business logic can run over the network in a decentralized manner. The following diagram shows the decentralized ecosystem overview where, on the bottom layer, Internet or Meshnets provides a decentralized communication layer, then a storage layer uses technologies such as IPFS and BigChainDB to enable decentralization, and finally, you see the blockchain that serves as a decentralized processing layer. Blockchain can, in a limited way, provide a storage layer too, but that seriously hampers the speed and capacity of the system; therefore, other solutions such as IPFS and BigChainDB are more suitable to store large amounts of data in a decentralized way. At the top, the Identity and Wealth layers are shown. Identity on the Internet is a very big topic and systems such as bitAuth and OpenID have provided authentication and identification services with varying degrees of decentralization and security assumptions. Blockchain is capable of providing solutions to various problems. A concept relevant to Identity known as Zooko'...