When a block stores new data it is added to the blockchain. Blockchain, as its name suggests, consists of multiple blocks strung together. In order for a block to be added to the blockchain, however, four things must happen:
- A transaction must occur. Let’s continue with the example of your impulsive Amazon purchase. After hastily clicking through multiple checkout prompt, you go against your better judgment and make a purchase. As we discussed above, in many cases a block will group together potentially thousands of transactions, so your Amazon purchase will be packaged in the block along with other users’ transaction information as well.
- That transaction must be verified. After making that purchase, your transaction must be verified. With other public records of information, like the Securities Exchange Commission, Wikipedia, or your local library, there’s someone in charge of vetting new data entries. With blockchain, however, that job is left up to a network of computers. When you make your purchase from Amazon, that network of computers rushes to check that your transaction happened in the way you said it did. That is, they confirm the details of the purchase, including the transaction’s time, dollar amount, and participants. (More on how this happens in a second.)
- That transaction must be stored in a block. After your transaction has been verified as accurate, it gets the green light. The transaction’s dollar amount, your digital signature, and Amazon’s digital signature are all stored in a block. There, the transaction will likely join hundreds, or thousands, of others like it.
- That block must be given a hash. Not unlike an angel earning its wings, once all of a block’s transactions have been verified, it must be given a unique, identifying code called a hash. The block is also given the hash of the most recent block added to the blockchain. Once hashed, the block can be added to the blockchain.
Is Blockchain Secure?
Blockchain technology accounts for the issues of security and trust in several ways. First, new blocks are always stored linearly and chronologically. That is, they are always added to the “end” of the blockchain. If you take a look at Bitcoin’s blockchain, you’ll see that each block has a position on the chain, called a “height.” As of August 2020, the block’s height had topped 646,132.2
After a block has been added to the end of the blockchain, it is very difficult to go back and alter the contents of the block. That’s because each block contains its own hash, along with the hash of the block before it. Hash codes are created by a math function that turns digital information into a string of numbers and letters. If that information is edited in any way, the hash code changes as well.
Here’s why that’s important to security. Let’s say a hacker attempts to edit your transaction from Amazon so that you actually have to pay for your purchase twice. As soon as they edit the dollar amount of your transaction, the block’s hash will change. The next block in the chain will still contain the old hash, and the hacker would need to update that block in order to cover their tracks. However, doing so would change that block’s hash. And the next, and so on.
In order to change a single block, then, a hacker would need to change every single block after it on the blockchain. Recalculating all those hashes would take an enormous and improbable amount of computing power. In other words, once a block is added to the blockchain it becomes very difficult to edit and impossible to delete.
To address the issue of trust, blockchain networks have implemented tests for computers that want to join and add blocks to the chain. The tests, called “consensus models,” require users to “prove” themselves before they can participate in a blockchain network. One of the most common examples employed by Bitcoin is called “proof of work.”
In the proof of work system, computers must “prove” that they have done “work” by solving a complex computational math problem. If a computer solves one of these problems, they become eligible to add a block to the blockchain. But the process of adding blocks to the blockchain, what the cryptocurrency world calls “mining,” is not easy. In fact, the odds of solving one of these problems on the Bitcoin network were about one in 17.56 trillion in August 2020.2 To solve complex math problems at those odds, computers must run programs that cost them significant amounts of power and energy .
Proof of work does not make attacks by hackers impossible, but it does make them somewhat useless. If a hacker wanted to coordinate an attack on the blockchain, they would need to control more than 50% of all computing power on the blockchain so as to be able to overwhelm all other participants in the network. Given the tremendous size of the Bitcoin blockchain, a so-called 51% attack is almost certainly not worth the effort and more than likely impossible.
Is Blockchain Private?
Anyone can view the contents of the blockchain, but users can also opt to connect their computers to the blockchain network as nodes. In doing so, their computer receives a copy of the blockchain that is updated automatically whenever a new block is added, sort of like a Facebook News Feed that gives a live update whenever a new status is posted.
Each computer in the blockchain network has its own copy of the blockchain, which means that there are thousands, or in the case of Bitcoin, millions of copies of the same blockchain. Although each copy of the blockchain is identical, spreading that information across a network of computers makes the information more difficult to manipulate. With blockchain, there isn’t a single, definitive account of events that can be manipulated. Instead, a hacker would need to manipulate every copy of the blockchain on the network. This is what is meant by blockchain is a “distributed” ledger.
Looking over the Bitcoin blockchain, however, you will notice that you do not have access to identifying information about the users making transactions. Although transactions on the blockchain are not completely anonymous, personal information about users is limited to their digital signature or username.
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