Even though we can often hear and read about blockchain technology, many are still unaware of how important technological achievement it actually is. It’s mainly because people still don’t know the terminology, its true meaning, importance, and role of each component. Namely, think of it as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece recipe, where nodes, ledger, minting, and immutability are some of the key ingredients that make this dish so unique. But, in order to understand the technology behind decentralized database storage and blockchain technology in general, one first needs to understand the basics, and what better place to start than with a ledger.

Shared ledger

A shared ledger is pretty important for us as end-users of decentralized databases because it makes things much easier. The information flow is much faster since the data are distributed through the network instead of being copied and duplicated like in centralized databases. But swift transactions and access to the data are just some of the benefits, and a much greater one is about security, as it also means that our data are much safer, and it is impossible to misuse them since we do not have copies of them but just one distributed data. That is possible thanks to individual nodes maintaining the ledger by distributing the database between all computers in the network. These shredded pieces of info are spread across the network, granting us much greater data safety.

Anti-corruption

Nodes are a crucial part of decentralized databases, and it is impossible to have one that operates without flaws if there are not enough of them. They also serve as ledger verifiers, and each network makes a decision based on the existence of consensus for every block. To explain it simpler, it is all about the consensus and about transactions, and if the majority of nodes in one network decide that a transaction is valid, it will be added to the ledger. If there is no majority, the transaction will not be added, and it will not be included in the ledger. That is the main reason why it is impossible to corrupt the system since it is impossible to have a valid transaction without the consensus, and corrupting one node cannot make a majority. This also says a lot about the importance of nodes, as they represent an integral part of the whole blockchain technology, as it precisely them that provides that much-craved autonomy. Besides that, this anti-corruption leads further to transparency.

Transparency

All information stored in the blockchain network is fully transparent and can be seen by anyone, but in order to see certain information, you need to have a private key that allows you to see it. When it comes to the identity of blockchain users, they are fully protected, and only the public address is shown thanks to encryption and complex cryptography. Transparency is crucial when it comes to secure data storage, and the transparency that decentralized databases provide is on a really high level. Because digital ledger guarantees us a high level of transparency, it also enables a much faster and more cost-efficient data storage.

To summarize

After reading all this, you should get a much better insight into the blockchain network and how important shared ledger is. The cryptocurrencies act as an entirely autonomous currency because of shared ledger, and as for database storage, this ledger allows decentralized database storage like IneryDB to be the pioneer in this field, granting the same level of independence and data security.

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