5 Features of Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology seems to be the buzzword of the day. Governments, entrepreneurs business people and banks, all have been paying attention and even allocating resources and investment to better understand and develop what sounds like the data structural holy grail of the future.

Blockchains are distributed peer-to-peer networks that can have many different applications. Bitcoin is the mother of all blockchain technology and it acts as a financial network, ledger, software, currency and asset. We’re dealing with new technology that can simultaneously integrate multiple functions, which is why regulators have a hard time defining cryptocurrencies.

Blockchains can be quite customizable to serve a wide array of needs and there are a few main features that many of them share in common.

5 Features of Blockchain Technology

• It is designed to be distributed and synchronized across networks, which makes it ideal for multi-organizational business networks such as supply chains or financial consortia. It also encourages organizations to come out from behind their firewalls and share data.
• Traditional international banking can be very slow, with settlement times often taking days to process. This is the main reason why most financial institutions are looking to upgrade their systems. Blockchains can usually settle money transfers at near instant speed. This can save time and money for the entire financial industry.

• Changes to public blockchains are publicly viewable by all parties creating transparency, and all transactions are immutable, meaning they cannot be altered or deleted.
• Blockchains tend to have better security because there is no single point of failure to shut down the network. Even the highest levels of our financial system are vulnerable to hacks. Bitcoin on the other hand, has never been hacked.
  Sure it’s possible to hack individual private keys if they’re not securely stored, but the network in and of itself remains fully secure. Blockchains are secured by many computers that run nodes and confirm transactions on the networks.
• You can’t just do whatever you want to the data. The types of transactions one can carry out are agreed between participants in advance and stored in the blockchain as “smart contracts,” which helps give confidence that everyone is playing by the rules.