I mean, do you seriously and fully master the idea of what blockchain technology is all about and how much it can affect the world you live in? Ask yourself this question as many times as possible. Blockchains can soon become the everything of the global economy and not just the economy. Blockchain technology offers solutions to many problems in so many fields, blockchain can make voting easier and more transparent than ever with the opportunity of instant results, blockchain can solve the medical system problem and in case a blockchain infrastructure was fully implemented it can replace passports, ID cards and even to give out humanitarian help in situations of crisis .
As I just started mining Webchain, I was trying to understand this CPU-only-mining cryptocurrency and if I was going to keep on mining it, I needed to be sure it was the best alternative coin (altcoin) to mine with cpu, I needed to confirm whether I was using the right cryptocurrency mining computer. By reading I could realize that most factors that make up the cryptocurrency mining most profitable environment are related to the blockchain they are based on. How can I operate this coin? how fast or slow can puzzles be solved? and a long list of parameters that I am not able to understand yet are set according to the blockchain the coin is based on.
I needed a number, I needed to know how many blockchains had been created, either as new ones or copies of existing ones. It was clear to me that Webchain was a customized version of an existing blockchain platform, so I wonder how many others could have been created the same way. My only tool was the internet , I could not go to a library and to be honest, it would have been really awkward to use non-digital material to research about a digital transactions recording tool.
Wikipedia helped me discover some important facts:
-A cryptographically secured chain of blocks was described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta.
-The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 (yes, more than 15 years after the first attempt)
-There’s a term called Blockchain 2.0 and it goes beyond transactions and enable "exchange of value without powerful intermediaries acting as arbiters of money and information”.
Time was passing and I couldn’t find any reliable source to tell how many blockchains existed and therefore I was unable to see how many CPU mineable cryptocurrencies I needed to compare. I found coinmarketcap, which was a sort of official and well known record of existing cryptocurrencies (either tokens or coins), the list reached 1601. But webchain had not been added to coinmarketcap and since coinmarketcap only lists coins that have trading volume above certain threshold, I could figure out that many of them weren’t there either.
My research was not successful in the way I was expecting, so I sticked to an article claiming that by the time it was being written (January 2018), there were over 600 blockchains in existence, with dozens more dreamed up every month. So, the real number is somewhere around a thousand existing blockchains with a countless number of coins and tokens based on them. Besides that, research shows the Blockchain market size is expected to grow from USD 210.2 Million in 2016 to USD 2,312.5 Million by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 61.5% during the forecast period., which confirms that avoiding getting involved with them is a mistake.
The potential uses for blockchain technology are numerous. As discussed earlier, it could be applied to almost any form of record-keeping, agreement, contract or register and they surely will. So, I think I am able to express a definition -on the eyes of a crypto newbie - for what I believe blockchains are:
""A digital chain of blocks. Blocks that are filled with data, data that, encrypted or not, is so interconnected (therefore creating a network) that instead of having someone approve and process a transaction, it needs the whole network to be aware of it. Each block is a molecule and altering one molecule would alter the whole fluid. ""
This is getting more and more interesting. It will take me time, but since I could not find the list of existing blockchains, I’ll have to create it on my own.