Hey guys! I decided to start this because I wanted to hold myself accountable in terms of learning and keeping up to date with new technologies as an aspiring software engineer. I’m currently interning at Capital One as a software engineer, and I have realized that it is essential for a software engineer to constantly learn new technologies that can solve critical issues that currently plague the developer community and the rest of the world. Specifically, my project this summer heavily relies on AWS services and systems, which is something I have never worked with before. I’m not going to be hard on myself about not knowing since there are hundreds of sophisticated tools and software out there, at the same time I also personally know that I haven’t made the effort before to at least attempt at learning some. As a result of coming to this conclusion, I decided to try to learn some of the ropes in a couple of weeks. So far, most of my learning has been through trial and error and scanning documentation, and I would definitely say that I have acquired a good amount of knowledge. If I were to practice this more, I’d say I’d be making a reasonable endeavor towards holding myself accountable and this blog is an example of that.

The first topic I will be discussing is the fundamentals of Blockchain technology. I chose this topic because I once visited a VC firm called Laconia Capital through a startup trek organized by my professional fraternity, Sigma Eta Pi, and I learned a great deal about Web3 from the founder. When discussing Web3, the primary source of this upcoming and profound technology traces back to the fundamentals of blockchain technology. So, for the longest time, I finally sat down today and I’m currently enrolled in a freecodecamp course on it. For today, I will be talking firstly on the fundamentals and then moving on to some of the practical applications we see today.

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Blockchain technology is a distributed database of records, called blocks, that are chained together in a chronological order. Blocks are added to blockchain network only if they are considered valid, which is determined by the proof-of-work demonstrated by the user who wants to add it. This proof-of-work consists of unraveling and solving the computationally difficult hash function.

A major application of this technology is primarily utilized in Bitcoin currency. Bitcoin solves the double-spending issue, which arises when the same block is utilized twice to reacquire any past crypto someone previously owned. It reduces this problem by introducing a majority rule that has to be reached by all the nodes, devices that validate the blockchain. This is a huge breakthrough as it prevents any malicious users from trying to corrupt the decentralization philosophy that blockchain upholds.

Tying in the proof-of-work concept and Bitcoin, if you have ever heard of Bitcoin miners, they’re the ones who compete with one another to solve for the blockchain’s next “hash”, a long alphanumeric string that connects the old block to the new block. The miner to solve this is granted access to the next group of transactions in the Bitcoin queue and places them into a block so that it can be installed onto the network. The reward for this is to receive transaction fees plus any bitcoins discovered in the block.

The success of figuring out the next “hash” is highly dependent on the computing power a miner has. So generally speaking, if the more computing power a miner has, the more successful they are at cracking the hash. However, at the end of the day, bitcoin mining is basically a “guessing game” so the same miner will not guess the hash correctly every time. Also, the difficulty of solving the hash function increases with the size of the network so this will impede a miner’s performance.

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I truly think that Blockchain technology that is going to be commonplace in a decentralized future. Although it has dominated only currency systems, blockchain has numerous applications in every sector of the economy. Specifically, the healthcare industry, which relies on its integrity to securely store medical records, could utilize blockchain to prevent data from being compromised. One issue that the industry encounters during its data storage practices is the creation of data silos, which don’t allow other members to access some data. By creating this privatization of data access, this breeds issues with security and lack of trust with patients. Blockchain technology can easily solve this with its decentralized approaches and practices, which will help uphold duties and responsibilities in healthcare. A field that I thought could really use the power of blockchain is DevOps, a field within software engineering that focuses on increasing an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services rapidly. While currently interning on the IAM, Identity and Access Management, team, I’m constantly reminded by the stress on the secure practices of accessing data and streamlining the process of integrating code into company repositories. By introducing blockchain technology, all data regarding Github changes and roles and policies of developer data access can be stored on the network.

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In conclusion, this was only a brief introduction and discussion of blockchain and I hope to learn more as time progresses. Thanks for reading!