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"The blockchain method primarily used by those engaging in cryptocurrency transactions is a decentralized mechanism where all the information is stored in blocks, can be viewed and altered by registered users. In the case of Sierra Leone elections, allows the votes to be seen by voters who are registered within the system, in the public ledgers, but only allowed authorized persons to make any changes, this, in turn, prevents the chances of fraud since the voting information is available to all the blockchain users."
I would personally like it if they would explain the mechanics of their so-called "blockchain" to us mortals.
As I understand a blockchain, it is an extensible data structure that (when used in a bitcoin context) incorporates sequentially applied, recursively structured self-referential checksum mechanisms to counter efforts at tampering with the contents of the blocks; usually, via recursive encryption.
~childo
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @05:45PM
The point of storing data is to be able to verify later that said data meets the conditions of the consensus algorithm all the way back to the first block that Satoshi produced.
Of course, a lot of that information is unnecessary to keep after a a while, especially when there's no practical way that some transaction history could be reversed. That's why you can choose today to run a "pruned" Bitcoin node that verifies what it needs to verify, and then throws out any information that definitely doesn't need to be re-verified at some point in the future. That is, if you've already verified information, there's no point in keeping it around; you just need to keep some hashes of that data, so that you can make sure new data is built atop that verified data.
The only problem occurs when someone else wants to verify for himself that everything is connected properly back to the initial block; if the whole network has nothing but pruned nodes, then that information will have been lost, and that won't be possible. So, the only way to verify everything anew is for someone to keep a record of everything, and at the moment, doing so doesn't really take up that much space, anyway.
I imagine that in the future, people will be happy being able to prove consensus to, say, 99.9999% certainty (however that will be defined), and they'll only keep enough information to be able to do that. Maybe each person will have to be responsible for keeping enough information to prove to others that his own transaction is indeed valid, thereby freeing others from having to store what they don't ultimately care about.
There's a lot of room for improvement.