The majority of what you see around you is “owned” by someone, isn’t it? Or, at the very least, someone is in charge of the environment around you. For instance, various persons may own different portions of the property around your house. Your wallet contains your own funds, which are maintained by the country’s extensive network of banks and financial institutions. Additionally, the aircraft you see lifting off into the sky are owned by one business and operated by a different one.
What about a blockchain, though? Have you ever wondered who the owners are? If so, let’s try to unravel this puzzling yet crucial question. And in order to achieve this, let’s quickly recap what a blockchain is and how it functions in order to make the idea of ownership more understandable.
How does a blockchain operate and who owns it
Simply put, a blockchain is created by connecting various blocks together. Each “block” consists of a collection of data or other information, most frequently transactions. And cryptography is used to connect these blocks with one another. A timestamp and a cryptographic hash, a function that turns any input into a string of characters with a predetermined length, are both included in each block in a chain. Each block further includes a hash of the one before it. With this connecting the two blocks, it is impossible to tamper with the ledger or change the sequence of transactions.
Thus, returning to the initial query, who owns a blockchain? The quick answer is? The blockchain technology belongs to no one. However, certain “blockchains” might be controlled by particular companies.
Some publicly distributed ledgers could be thought of as having ‘community ownership,’ in a sense. This is due to how transparent a public blockchain is, allowing anyone to add transactions and audit them. So in a sense, you could say that the people who take part in the transactions that are recorded on the chain work together to develop blockchains.
Therefore, a blockchain made up of such blocks is a digital ledger, and the blocks themselves are digital recordings of transactions. On a blockchain, each time a transaction takes place, a fresh block is created and added to the ledger. Mining is the process of adding new transactions to an existing public ledger of transactions. A block of transactions is hashed in this process.
To gain more clarity, consider the example of Bitcoin. Each mining process entails documenting the Bitcoin-related transactions that take place on the blockchain, and it pays the miners more Bitcoins in exchange.
To sum up
Simply simply, everyone owns blockchain technology even though no one owns it. One of the distinguishing characteristics of blockchain technology is this common ownership and accountability, which gives blockchains their high level of security and immutability. Decentralization is also advantageous because no single entity has power over a blockchain.
