Blockchains and Immutable Data

While still an emerging technology within the consumer and corporate technology space, here at Redi Software we are already reaping the benefits of this methodology. We have completed several projects within this space including a public/private ledger for a political party to capture constituent voting to prevent tampering or manipulation of results and a cryptographically verifiable database for verifying transactional history.

A blockchain is a list of records organised into ‘blocks’ which continue to grow. Each block is securely linked together using cryptography. Each contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and the transaction data you wish to store. As blocks each contain information about the block previous to it, they form a chain (hence the name ‘blockchain’). Each additional block reinforcing the ones before it so blockchains are resistant to modification of their data because once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.