Developing trust in blockchains
As Muslims we know that the Qur’an is unaltered. Each letter along with its precise intonation and point of articulation has been meticulously preserved over centuries. We know this because the Qur’an is mutawatir. This means that the Qur’an has been independently transmitted by so many separate lines of narrators directly from the source that it is inconceivable that they could have converged and agreed upon a lie. Therefore, the veracity of what is being narrated by them is unquestionable. This intergenerational preservation of the Qur’an is still being perpetuated today by the millions of individuals who choose to commit the Qur’an to memory.
The Qur’an is immutable, unique and divinely protected with no genuine similitude. However, the method of using some sort of consensus mechanism to ensure the veracity of transmitted information is not unique. One such attempt in the modern era is blockchain.
A blockchain consists of blocks. At a fundamental level, a block is simply a collection of records or data. Raw data will first have to go through cryptographic hashing. A cryptographic hash is similar to a digital code representing a certain amount of data. In cryptographic hash functions, the transactions are taken as an input and run through a hashing algorithm which gives an output of a fixed size. Each block has a particular capacity. Once this capacity of a block is reached it is added to the network.
A public, decentralized blockchain has many mechanisms built into it to ensure the veracity of data. Two of the most salient of these mechanisms are the following:
Immutable records
No participant can tamper with transactions once it has been recorded to the shared ledger. Any data recorded is permanent. A mined block references the previous block. The cryptographic hash ensures that if any information is changed, it would change the hash of that block, which would affect all blocks in the chain.
Distributed ledger technology
All network participants have access to the distributed ledger and its record of transactions. A blockchain allows the data held in that database to be spread out among several network nodes at various locations. The result of this is that there isn’t a single point of failure and the entire blockchain won’t be compromised if only one, or a minority of the nodes are compromised.
Blockchain is often associated with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, however, it has many more use cases. It can be used to facilitate payment processing, supply chain traceability and record keeping. Blockchain technology is still in its nascent stages, as it develops, we may see many more use cases and developments.
Allah Knows Best.
If you’d like to know more about blockchain and cryptocurrencies you can check out Is the cryptocurrency craze much ado about nothing? and Bitcoin: The new dinar