What is blockchain?

Just like every other day, you are enjoying your morning with a cup of coffee and news feeds. At the same time, somewhere, a financially motivated hacker is finding all of the possible ways to compromise millions of users' accounts for a widely used social networking site. The hacker is successful in gaining access to the database and exfiltrates a large amount of credentials.

After around 180 days, this massive credential theft is revealed publicly, and you find out that you are also one of the people who has been targeted. Just like you, millions of other users also have a good reason to be worried about their attached trust and privacy. The examples range from the latest Equifax 2017 Data Breach case (143 million credentials compromised) to the Adult Friend Finder 2016 case (413 million account thefts), the Anthem 2015 case (78 million accounts were hacked), and many more. None of the preventative solutions can be 100% secure, but finding out what the problem was at the right time could have saved the misuse of these accounts. What if a technology can do the following?:

• Detect who looks at a person's account and changes it
• Ensure that data concerning the person is not misused

This sounds like a smart thing to use, but it's not that difficult to implement. This is what a blockchain does. In a nutshell, it's nothing but a smart, safe, and constantly growing database. Blockchain is a chronological ledger that records transactions of any value or asset securely. The blockchain network provides the ability to transfer any type of value or asset between independent parties using a peer-to-peer network. The initial objective of the blockchain technology was to establish trusted financial transactions between two independent parties without any involvement of third-parties such as a bank; however, later, several industries adopted blockchain to streamline their supply chain process, KYC system, data management, and so on. With the growing use of online services and a growing number of online transactions, users have to trust and depend on third parties such as banks and payment gateway providers. This led to the birth of the blockchain.