Uses of Blockchain

The Use Cases

The main application areas for blockchain technology are listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Some Important Uses of Blockchains

While blockchain itself offers many real-world benefits, it also presents major challenges. There are several reasons why blockchains are facing major challenges, and the focus here is on overcoming these issues.

 One primary issue is scalability. Scalability refers to the ability of a blockchain to grow in size without decreasing availability or costs. Scaling a blockchain requires more storage space and less computing power than scaling a bank. As a result, blockchains run into limitations as they start with smaller blocks then eventually grow very large. Another problem facing blockchains today is data latency. Many data sources used today have an extremely low latency of less than a millimeter (~0.04mm), which would make blockchain networks highly vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Lastly, blockchains face a lack of trustworthiness. Trustworthiness of the final blockchain or blockchain network would require having hundreds of nodes participating every minute over thousands of years, during which time millions of events would occur and affect the blockchain and its participants. These, combined with scalability, would present problems for blockchains. Other factors that could present challenges currently facing blockchains include high energy consumption on infrastructure, the inability of the network to scale, the challenge of establishing trusting relationships with users, and the anonymity of key data. Perhaps if we had looked outwards, we could see that blockchains could become truly amazing networks, however, at the present state, the block-based financial systems are quite robust and scalable, providing a lot of advantages over the traditional banking systems.

C

Each block contains metadata called “keywords” and the hash value of all corresponding keywords. When we consider the entire set of keys to all block keys, then we will get a meta-block that can be used to create a document called a title with an appropriate text label. Once it is created, additional block keys may be created and/or modified while new block keys are also created. So, to understand blockchain, it is prudent to take some time to clarify what these terms mean. Here, I outline what each term represents

Block: this is a sequence of keys on the blockchain

Keyword: each keyword has a special name for itself

Document: a list of documents with meta-keyspace titles

Meta-Block: these are also referred to as meta-blocks

How We Create Them

Blockchains consist of two types of keys: keys held in wallets and keys held directly on tokens.

keywords

  Each keyword consists of a random string of letters and numbers. These strings have four types: start letter, end letter, character types, and categories (see Figure 2). Since the keyword characters are arbitrary, the possible combinations of the four types of keywords are infinite. But let’s begin by looking at the first type. Start Letters refer to a type of sentence (e.g., a sentence in English) that contains more than two words. If the start letter is a number, then the keyword is a number. If the start letter is a letter, then the keyword is a lowercase letter character (e.g., e.t.c. as shown in Figure 3). Lowercase letters include U+1 through Z+9 (or sometimes lowercase letters that combine into lowercase letters), except a few examples.

 A keyword is a long-length segment of Unicode characters which holds one or more keywords. Keywords exist in many different forms such as strings, words, sentences, characters, etc. Keywords can be created with the help of regular expressions or by using certain word processors, but they commonly follow the format shown in Figure 2.

 An example of using a regular expression to write a keyword

Let’s look at the second type, keywords in English. An example would be a keyword in a sentence written in italics (e.t.c.). Keywords can also be written in symbols, digits, or figures.

 Keywords in English

The third type of keyword is a string of numbers (see Figure 5 for illustration). Keywords can be denoted in different ways. Let me give you an example. Suppose your company wishes to send a notice of product promotion to all current and prospective customers. You could use a binary number that represents the number of promotional emails required per month. A keyword that will be generated for that would be “send 100% off for 10 days + 200 email sign-up”. Similarly, multiple keywords can be expressed by a combination of multiple values, such as “email sign-up”, “email sign-up,” “email sign-up plus shipping,” etc. If the value of the keyword is a percentage of sales volume, then it is a percentage. Finally, I just want you to compare the numbers! To illustrate, imagine that, for instance, we sent out 150 coupons, so for each coupon, we would need 60 unique coupons. Using this notation, we can write a keyword like "send 10% of sales of products in the past quarter" or "send 100% off our product promotion to every customer every quarter." What do we want? A random number represents the number of items ordered. With that, you would see that various keywords could be written that would return a constant value such as sending back a constant amount of emails to your customers in a quarter.

 A keyword such as "Send 25% of revenue on email signup" or Send 50% discount on total cost"

In general, for each keyword on the blockchain and its corresponding meta-key, a transaction will be added to the blockchain and the same transaction will always be validated for every current or upcoming block. From this point forward, there is a meta-block that keeps track of what other meta-blocks have previously agreed on that keyword to add a new meta-block to the chain, and so on until there is no meta-block. Essentially, the process is the following:

Meta-Blocks: Meta-blocks hold a list of meta-blocks that are shared on the blockchain

Presto: After every meta-block is approved on the blockchain, the last meta-block will be approved which brings us to our fourth component which is Presto. Presentation is a name for moving data from a given block to another by transferring the data block, typically into a new block. Data Blocks: It is the process of storing data in blocks so that new blocks are added to the existing block

Mining: data blocks are created regularly from blocks and transferred to new blocks on the blockchain

 illustrates different operations on blocks and how they are created and distributed

Conclusion

Blockchains represent the best of both worlds. They offer security, allow sharing key data, and enable data privacy and decentralization. However, blockchains face numerous challenges, including scalability, security, latency, scalability, uncertainty as a result of network growth, and data leakage. Yet, blockchains have already demonstrated a huge number of applications and could make a profound impact on our lives. More work needs to be done by blockholders, especially those operating platforms in the first place, but the possibilities are endless. How will the future shape up, and more importantly, who will benefit from the future? Only time will tell.

Blockchain