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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Background III—What Is Blockchain Technology?

Authors : Erik Hofmann, Urs Magnus Strewe, Nicola Bosia

Published in: Supply Chain Finance and Blockchain Technology

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Contrary to the current systems, with BCT, transactions are broadcasted, recorded and stored by many participants of the network and not in any central proprietary server, which allows transactions to be finalised in minutes because no reconciliation or any manual intervention is needed in the background. Further improvements of the technology offer the capability of implementing a broader range of software routines, including the entirety of what is offered by mere token systems, which opens up the possibility of also representing financial securities and instruments directly on the distributed ledger.

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previous chapter Background II—What Is Reverse Securitisation?

next chapter Concept—Where Are the Opportunities of Blockchain-Driven Supply Chain Finance?

Terminology is still evolving and strict definitions have not yet been fully established (IFF 2015).

The timestamp is a 4-byte file, which is based on the number of seconds elapsed from 1 January 1970, midnight UTC/GMT (Epoch Unit Timestamp) (Antonopoulos 2014, p. 188). At the time of writing (2 March 2016, 11:59 A.M), the time is 1456916388 (http://www.epochconverter.com/).

Calculated with the SHA256 hash calculator, from http://www.xorbin.com/tools/sha256-hash-calculator.

Due to the complexity of the cryptographic proof protocol, the example is simplified. The purpose is to show the underlying process behind cryptographic proof.

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For Bitcoin, it takes on average 150 quadrillion hash calculations per second for the network to solve the problem, which means a block every 10 min (Antonopoulos 2014, p. 194).

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Title: Background III—What Is Blockchain Technology?
Authors: Erik Hofmann
Urs Magnus Strewe
Nicola Bosia
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Supply Chain Finance and Blockchain Technology
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62370-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-62371-9

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62371-9_4