Blockchains and sustainable development

Written by Marco Aniballi from CC Forum

Blockchain as a tool - what is blockchain?

Specifically, a blockchain is an immutable database of cryptographically secured transactions (transactions in the data sense, not financial). It is immutable, which means that once a record is written to the database, it cannot be removed or changed. Whilst interesting, how it accomplishes this is beyond the scope of this article. Part of what secures a blockchain platform is the fact that many machines (100s to 10s of 1,000s) around the world participate in verifying the correctness of each transaction. It is distributed and therefore very difficult to “compromise.” This is where the “trustless” nature of these infrastructures comes from. You don’t need to trust anyone, only trust the math (which is publicly disclosed for all to see), but this in itself represents a very different economic model to our traditional ways of interacting, which largely have been based on more centralised processes and proce…