History
From ancient times to the present day, ledgers have been used to record contracts, payments, and trading deals. In the Roman Empire, there was a widespread accounting system that could enable money transfers from one place to another. While it was only possible to keep ledgers up to date with each other in the Roman Empire, centuries later, the Byzantine Generals Problem emerged in 1982 and solutions for data storage began to be offered. The Byzantine Generals Problem is the problem caused by delays in communication between Byzantine generals during a siege. And in 1992, the intellectual foundations of blockchain were laid and Merkle trees and cryptographic hash functions emerged. With the introduction of cryptocurrencies into our lives, concepts such as blockchain and distributed ledger technology appear more and more in the media and in the news.
What Is Distributed Ledger Technology?
In 2017, the World Bank defined Distributed Ledger Technology as a distributed, encrypted data storage method, which is shared between different parties and eliminates the need for trust. In this process, with the addition of encrypted versions of the stored data to the next data, blockchain technology emerges. With Distributed Ledger Technology, storing data in different places makes it difficult to alter or destruct data. Because all data storage points must be attacked in order to damage the system. And if there is an alteration at one point, it can be detected and corrected with exact copies at other points.
The Difference Between Blockchain and Distributed Ledger
Blockchain is an example of a Distributed Ledger. However, the newly added data in transactions on blockchain contains a summary of previous transactions. In this way, the data can, in a sense, follow itself backwards.
Blockstream: A Seminal Example of Blockchain Distributed Ledger System
Data in Distributed Ledger is secured by storing multiple copies. Taking it one step further, Blockstream stores snapshots of the Bitcoin blockchain by 6 satellites orbiting the Earth. Anyone can download data using satellite connection instead of internet connection.
