Bitcoin Transaction 101: PART 1

Bitcoin is all the rage these days, but lets face it, at the current rates most of us will probably never have the opportunity to own Bitcoins and learn how these transactions work.

But fret not! You can still learn how Bitcoin transactions work via our Demo Framework. On this article, I'll guide you through from signing-up and performing your first Bitcoin transaction!

Calling dibs on ÐApps

If you've been reading up on 'Bitcoin', I'm sure at a certain point in time you would have come across the term 'Cryptography' or 'Blockchain'. If you've been reading up on the Blockchain, you would have probably come across the term 'Crypto-Tokens' and 'Smart Contracts'. But for now, 'ÐApps' have been mostly in the domain of software developers and 'Blockchainers'; people who develop applications on the Blockchain.

Better stick to SQL

To recap, we have so far discussed the three key concepts of the Blockchain which are decentralization, consensus and trustless. Which in my humble opinion is what made the Blockchain technology so exciting to geeks the world over.

But at its core, the Blockchain is just another database. When talking about storing and processing data, there is nothing that the Blockchain can do that any other conventional database cannot do (MySQL, MSSQL, No SQL or what not).

Multifactor Authentication on the Blockchain

We were looking into securing our applications and with the recent hacks everywhere, we thought it might be time to look into utilizing our Blockchain framework as an identity authentication tool.

Fun at work: A lottery ticket Blockchain implementation

Try looking at thousands of lines of code on a daily basis and on top of that, add a layer of cryptography and smart contracts to the mix.

What you get is a bunch of developers just going through the motions.

So in order to spruce up our development work we decided to build something fun instead.

One of our first forays into smart contracts was to implement a Blockchain ticketing token system through a lottery based game.

Ether Sandman

Ok so we did a ton of work on Bitcoin, from building the standard wallet framework to experimenting with multi signatures and colored coin concepts.

We knew that we wanted to focus on Smart Contracts as our core business, but Bitcoin was built to be implemented as a currency. It's colored coins implementation is fairly limited in order to do what we dreamed of doing with this technology. So after reading a lot of literature on the subject, we decided to focus on the Ethereum Blockchain. Ethereum's cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH) is currently the second largest cryptocurrency in circulation in the market with a market cap of over USD 30 Billion.

Warning! Technical jargon... Part 2

In this part we're going to talk about Blockchain Cryptography, that secret sauce that powers this whole concept. Again, we are going to mostly use Bitcoin as reference here. 

Blockchain cryptography is in the form of a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) to hash addresses and encrypt information. An address is where you store and perform your Blockchain transactions. A Bitcoin address is essentially your wallet where you store, receive and send coins. The Blockchain uses this address to identify you and other person's that you are dealing with.

Warning! Technical jargon... Part 1

Nah... Its really not that complicated, well maybe.

So as part of our R&D exercise, we developed the Kryptosys Demo Framework to showcase our work on Blockchain technology. It's an ever expanding project for now and will continue to grow as we build more and more solutions.

You can register for a free account here: Kryptosys Demo Framework Sign Up

And we begin...

Kryptosys was started to further our research and development into Blockchain technology. By no means we claim to be the know-all-and-be-all of this Blockchain technology. As with every other human mortal, we are continuously learning and improving ourselves as we go along. So if you need to be mean, just chill out for a bit.

The Blockchain began to emerge in early 2009 in the wake of a worldwide economic crisis, via a paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto titled "Bitcoin - A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". His 9 page paper described a new protocol and a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin.