know more about Block Chain- complete Guide

Blockchain is a public electronic ledger built around a P2P system that can be openly shared among disparate users to create an unchangeable record of transactions, each time-stamped and linked to the previous one. Every time a set of transactions is added, that data becomes another block in the chain (hence, the name).

Blockchain can only be updated by consensus between participants in the system, and once new data is entered it can never be erased. It is a write-once, append-many technology, making it a verifiable and auditable record of each and every transaction.

While it has great potential, blockchain technology development is still early days; CIOs and their business counterparts should expect setbacks in deploying the technology, including the real possibility of serious bugs in the software used atop blockchain. And as some companies have already discovered, it's not the be-all solution to many tech problems.

Blockchain standards organizations, universities and start-ups have proposed newer consensus protocols and methods for spreading out the computational and data storage workload to enable greater transactional throughput and overall scalability – a persistent problem for blockchain.  And the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project has created modular tools for building out blockchain collaboration networks.

While some industry groups are working toward standardizing versions of blockchain software, there are also hundreds of startups working on their own versions of the distributed ledger technology.

Why has blockchain been getting so much buzz?

In a word, bitcoin – the wildly hyped cryptocurrency that allows for payment transcations over an open network using encryption and without exposing the identities of individual bitcoin owners. It was the first ever decentralized one when it was created in 2009. Other forms of cryptocurrency or virtual money, such as Ether (based on the Ethereum blockchain application platform), have also gained significant traction and opened new venues for cross-border monetary exchanges. (Ethereum was introduced in 2013 by developer Vitalik Buterin, who was 19 at the time.)

The term bitcoin was first... well, coined in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto (likely a pseudonym for one or more developers) wrote a paper about a "peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

For more than a year, however, Bitcoin has been on a roller coaster ride, with its value dropping from a peak of nearly $20,000 to a little more than $3,500, mainly due to the fact that it has no intrinsic value; its worth is based only on high demand and limited supply. Unlike fiat currencies or stocks, there is no institution or government backing the value of bitcoin.

That may change for cryptocurrencies someday.

Governments have already made overtures toward creating stablecoins, or cryptocurrency that’s backed by a stable asset such a gold or traditional fiat currency. Blockchain is also being used to digitize other assets, such as cars, real estate and even artwork.