Block Chain Technology

The IT Department through its Staff Development Committee conducted a webinar via MS Teams titled, “Block Chain Technology” in 8th March 2023 at 12PM. The SDC introduced and welcomed the speaker after which, the speaker started her presentation. First, the speaker discussed the flow diagram of Block Chain Technology and immediately she introduced and defined cryptocurrency and its related topic, bitcoin. Shem mentioned that Blockchain is the technology behind ‘bitcoin, whereas bitcoin is a digital token and blockchain is the ledger that keeps track of who owns the digital tokens. In order for the audience to have clarity about the topic, the presenter emphasized that a person can’t have a bitcoin without blockchain but you can have a blockchain even without bitcoin. She mentioned also other prominent cryptocurrencies such as ethereum, bitcoin cash, ripple and litecoin, and most dominant coin is the bitcoin.
Moreover, the presenter reiterated why people are shifting from the old technology to a new technology such as block chain – it is because through such technology, ie bank transactions, the technology in such case will take over the middle man in between the transactions (the process of transferring money from the sender to the receiver will be faster as compared when using a middleman). This process refers to block chain technology as the technology governs a ledger of data. Also, Dr Brilly explained what are block chains? She defined it in a way the audience can relate – example, blocks in a chain is just like pages in a book (or a book is a chain of pages), however she presented block chain as it is just a file or data structure, ie. How data is sensibly put together and stored. Other data structures are databases, text files, images, lists and so on. In order for the participants to grasp this technical presentation, Dr Brilly mentioned few properties of block chain such as decentralized, immutable data store, shared book that records all transactions, greater transparency and trust to all parties; and its implementation. Towards the end of her presentation, she presented the architecture of block chain, different versions of block chain and most importantly the future of block chain technology. Before she ended her presentation, the speaker made a short practical demonstration how block chain transactions are made. It was indeed an interesting topic and presentation; and the expectations were met because the examples are real life examples. Before the Staff Development Committee presented to her the signed Certificate of Appreciation, Mr William asked what are the drawback of this block chain technology – if this technology will replace the traditional ledger transactions, and the presenter answered and explained it very concise and clear.
There were 46 participants who benefited the presentation. A feedback was taken and as a result, the presenter got a mean score of 4.5 on a 1-5 scale where 5 is the highest. This implies that the participants were satisfied with the way Dr Brilly presented the topic.