Your oral health is more important than you might realize. Learn how the health of your mouth, teeth and gums can affect your general health.
Did you know that your oral health offers clues about your overall health — or that problems in your mouth can affect the rest of your body? Protect yourself by learning more about the connection between your oral health and overall health.
What's the connection between oral health and overall health?
Like other areas of the body, your mouth teems with bacteria — mostly harmless. But your mouth is the entry point to your digestive and respiratory tracts, and some of these bacteria can cause disease.
Normally the body's natural defenses and good oral health care, such as daily brushing and flossing, keep bacteria under control. However, without proper oral hygiene, bacteria can reach levels that might lead to oral infections, such as tooth decay and gum disease.
Also, certain medications — such as decongestants, antihistamines, painkillers, diuretics and antidepressants — can reduce saliva flow. Saliva washes away food and neutralizes acids produced by bacteria in the mouth, helping to protect you from microbes that multiply and lead to disease.
Studies suggest that oral bacteria and the inflammation associated with a severe form of gum disease (periodontitis) might play a role in some diseases. And certain diseases, such as diabetes and HIV/AIDS, can lower the body's resistance to infection, making oral health problems more severe.
What conditions can be linked to oral health?
Your oral health might contribute to various diseases and conditions, including:
Endocarditis. This infection of the inner lining of your heart chambers or valves (endocardium) typically occurs when bacteria or other germs from another part of your body, such as your mouth, spread through your bloodstream and attach to certain areas in your heart.
Cardiovascular disease. Although the connection is not fully understood, some research suggests that heart disease, clogged arteries and stroke might be linked to the inflammation and infections that oral bacteria can cause.
Pregnancy and birth complications. Periodontitis has been linked to premature birth and low birth weight.
Pneumonia. Certain bacteria in your mouth can be pulled into your lungs, causing pneumonia and other respiratory diseases.
Certain conditions also might affect your oral health, including:
Diabetes. By reducing the body's resistance to infection, diabetes puts your gums at risk. Gum disease appears to be more frequent and severe among people who have diabetes.
Research shows that people who have gum disease have a harder time controlling their blood sugar levels. Regular periodontal care can improve diabetes control.
HIV/AIDS. Oral problems, such as painful mucosal lesions, are common in people who have HIV/AIDS.
Osteoporosis. This bone-weakening disease is linked with periodontal bone loss and tooth loss. Certain drugs used to treat osteoporosis carry a small risk of damage to the bones of the jaw.
Alzheimer's disease. Worsening oral health is seen as Alzheimer's disease progresses.
Other conditions that might be linked to oral health include eating disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, certain cancers and an immune system disorder that causes dry mouth (Sjogren's syndrome).
Tell your dentist about the medications you take and about changes in your overall health, especially if you've recently been ill or you have a chronic condition, such as diabetes.
How can I protect my oral health?
To protect your oral health, practice good oral hygiene daily.
Brush your teeth at least twice a day for two minutes each time. Use a soft-bristled brush and fluoride toothpaste.
Floss daily.
Use mouthwash to remove food particles left after brushing and flossing.
Eat a healthy diet and limit sugary food and drinks.
Replace your toothbrush every three to four months, or sooner if bristles are splayed or worn.
Schedule regular dental checkups and cleanings.
Avoid tobacco use.
Also, contact your dentist as soon as an oral health problem arises. Taking care of your oral health is an investment in your overall health
If you are interested in strategy, you will likely encounter military strategy. If you get interested in military strategy, you will likely encounter a man called John Boyd.
To some people, Boyd was one of the greatest military strategists of all time, alongside Sun Tzu and Karl von Clausewitz.
To others, he was a crackpot. Cedric Chin quotes USAF Chief of Staff General Merrill McPeak, who said: “Boyd is highly overrated…in many respects he was a failed officer and even a failed human being.”
I don’t endorse joining the military, but I do endorse learning about John Boyd. Over the last three years, I’ve read many books about Boyd and his ideas. In this post, I will synthesize my own research and understanding of Boyd’s account of strategy in general, not specifically with respect to military applications but as applicable in business, non-profit organizations, and my own personal domain of interest, monasteries.
Over the course of his career, Boyd went from being one of the best pilots and dogfighters in the US Air Force, to providing the theoretical foundation for the military reform movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Biographical History of John Boyd’s life – Osinga’s Science, Strategy, and War (p. 41)
John Boyd’s formal military career began in 1944, when he enlisted in the US Army.
In the early fifties, he transferred to the US Air Force, where he became a star pilot during the Korean War, and later became an instructor at the prestigious Fighter Weapons School.
There, he found a passion for teaching and sharing his insights, which culminated in the publication of his famous Aerial Attack Study, which Ian T. Brown says “was such a thorough piece of work that no significant contributions have been made to fighter tactics since its publication.”
In the early sixties, he received a degree in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech University. He combined his newfound skills in mathematics and engineering with his intuition for aviation to create Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory, which allowed engineers to determine an aircraft’s performance characteristics or to design an aircraft to optimize performance.
E-M Theory allowed Boyd to compare the relative performance of American and Soviet planes, leading to the astonishing realization that Soviet aircraft tended to perform better than the American planes. This shock enabled the United States military to course correct, and to develop new aircraft that exceeded Soviet weaponry. Boyd used his E-M theory in these efforts, leading to the creation of multiple aircraft, including the F-16 Fighting Falcon, as well as the F-15 Eagle, The F/A-18 Hornet, and the A-10 Thunderbolt II.
After his official retirement in 1975, he continued to work, but as a civilian. This final phase of his career began with a period of research. Boyd intensively studied topics like science and history in order to work towards a more general account of conflict, strategy, and victory.
Boyd’s research gave him a theoretical basis for adapting his insights in domains like aircraft combat and design to war and conflict more broadly. He fleshed these theories out in a series of presentations that he developed from 1976 to 1995: Destruction and Creation, Patterns of Conflict, Organic Design for Command and Control, The Strategic Game of ? and ?, Revelation, and The Essence of Winning and Losing. Boyd delivered these presentations repeatedly to audiences in the Pentagon and different branches of the military. These presentations were known for taking hours, or in some cases, days.
Boyd’s research, theories, and presentations formed a significant component of the military reform movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s. These presentations also led to the development of the philosophy of maneuver warfare, as adopted by the Marine Corps and some other branches of the military.
In 1990, he was also asked by Dick Cheney, as George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, to help develop a strategy for Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War. The first Gulf War’s rapid speed—42 days in early 1991—has been attributed to Boyd’s influence.
Boyd was a practitioner, a researcher, a theoretician, and a pragmatist. He based his theories on both his first-hand experience and his research, and used his theories to enact change in multiple branches of the U.S. military, in multiple different ways throughout his official career and even after his formal retirement.
What were Boyd’s major ideas?
Although Boyd was primarily interested in military strategy, his ideas illuminate strategy and conflict more broadly. He offered what Frans Osinga calls a “comprehensive theory of conflict,” including the levels of tactics, operations, strategy, and grand strategy.
Some have seen him as a “great synthesizer,” integrating a wide range of ideas from military history and contemporary science into a contemporary account of strategy. Osinga claims this view is incomplete, as “it fails to acknowledge genuine novel elements he added to this synthesis” and the ways in which his ideas transcend “those of classical theorists of the manueverists school of strategic thought.”
For example, it would be easy to limit Boyd’s work to merely re-hashing Sun Tzu’s ideas for the 20th century. Indeed, Osinga claims that Sun Tzu “must be considered the true conceptual albeit ancient father of Boyd’s work.” Boyd repeatedly read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and it was “the only theoretical book on war that Boyd did not find fundamentally flawed.”
Osinga believes that while Boyd was heavily inspired by Sun Tzu, Boyd also made novel contributions to Sun Tzu’s work “by rediscovering, translating and updating the concepts of Sun Tzu and the other strategists to suit the era he found himself in. To Sun Tzu Boyd adds the Blitzkrieg concept which re-combines, according to Boyd, the elements that have historically produced success using the new tools of this century; the tank, the aircraft and modern communication equipment. To some extent one could also consider his rediscovery of operational art a novelty in his day.”
Osinga sees Boyd as “the first postmodern strategist both in content and in his approach to making strategy and strategic theory.” He demonstrates that through his reading, Boyd was familiar with the questions and research in the larger scientific and epistemic Zeitgeist, and worked to develop an account of strategy that was consistent with these findings.
Unfortunately, learning about Boyd’s ideas is challenging and laborious, for several reasons. Most importantly, Boyd never wrote a treatise summarizing his thoughts and works as a whole. Destruction and Creation is an essay, but it is a brief eight page document. Boyd’s basic approach to research and sharing his ideas was creating, delivering, and refining oral presentations. While some recordings of Boyd exist, these presentations are largely preserved in the form of slides, which are difficult to understand without Boyd’s verbal explanations or the analysis of experts like Osinga. Moreover, the slides exist in different versions, as Boyd iterated on his presentations over time as his thinking evolved.
Another challenge in learning Boyd’s ideas is that not all of his adherents understood his ideas completely. Brown in particular criticizes William S. Lind, who promoted Boyd’s ideas widely but had an “incomplete interpretation” that “reached a much wider audience, but…left the nuances of Boyd’s briefings behind.” This has resulted in oversimplifications of Boyd’s ideas, which can look trite and underwhelming in their watered down forms.
In what follows, I will present and summarize the most important ideas I’ve come across from Boyd. I will present them in the most general form possible, without overly emphasizing their military applications.
Uncertainty
Boyd’s account of strategy claims that uncertainty and change being a fundamental aspect of conflict and, more generally, life itself. Rather than avoiding uncertainty, embracing it will help individuals and organizations to survive and thrive.
Boyd’s emphasis on uncertainty comes from a variety of sources, but most notably it comes from his unique connection between and synthesis of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (“One cannot determine the consistency of a system within itself”), Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (“One cannot simultaneously fix or determine precisely the momentum and position of a particle”), and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (“All natural processes generate entropy”). Boyd claims that “taken together… [these proofs] say that one cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.”
OODA
Boyd’s most famous idea is his “OODA loop,” also known as the “decision cycle” or “Boyd cycle.” Typically, this is presented as a four-step process that relates to decisions or conflicts at any level:
Observation: noticing or perceiving a situation (“I see a fast object coming towards me!”)
Orientation: interpreting or making an estimation of the situation (“That’s probably a drunk driver! They might hit me!”)
Decision: making a decision of what to do about that situation (“I’m going to jump out of the way.”)
Action: taking the action (Jumping out of the way)
This action creates a new situation, and the loop can repeat itself.
Simplified OODA Loop – Osinga’s Science, Strategy, and War (p. 2)
Each person or group operates within their own decision cycle. The person who loops through the OODA loop faster has an advantage over their enemies. There are two ways to be faster: to move faster, or to cause the enemy to be slower by creating friction. Either way, you loop faster and more effectively than your enemy, you will succeed. Seen through the lens of the OODA loop, time is a major advantage if used well.
While this way of understanding of the OODA loop can be useful, it is an oversimplification. This oversimplification is useful at the tactical level but less so at higher levels of strategy. It also leads to an overemphasis on speed. Brown says that Boyd criticized maneuverists who “clung to the idea of absolute speed, [responding] ‘Christ, we’ll all drive each other nuts.’” The main point for Boyd was to have relative speed: “All I have to do is be faster than my adversary. I can be slow as long as I slow [him] down even more.” To take the OODA loop at face level would be to miss its deeper significance, which has applications at all levels of strategy.
Towards the end of his life, Boyd created a more complete rendering of the OODA loop. Here is the full OODA loop:
The Real OODA Loop – Osinga’s Science, Strategy, and War (p. 270)
Rather than a simple linear loop, each part of the OODA loop has a number of connections with the others. This is what Boyd described as an “ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, correlation, and rejection.”
In this diagram, Orientation, or the “Big O,” plays a central role: it “shapes observation, shapes decision, shapes action, and in turn is shaped by the feedback and other phenomena coming into our sensing or observing window.”
Osinga explains: “The mental images we construct are shaped by our personal experience, genetic heritage, and cultural traditions, but they are also measured up against incoming new information to validate existing schemata. The entire OODA loop is a double-loop learning process, but the Orientation element itself thus also contains such a double loop feature.”
If we can refine and improve our orientations—our models for interpreting what we are observing—then we will act more effectively than our enemies, or adapt to changing circumstances with more success.
Asymmetric Fast Transients
Much of Boyd’s theories came from his direct experience flying F-86’s in combat and as an instructor. Boyd was famous for a standing bet he developed as an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School. He claimed that if another fighter pilot was on his six (behind him), he could reverse their positions within forty seconds. If he failed, he would pay the other pilot forty dollars.
As Coram tells it, no one ever beat Boyd, who earned the nickname “Forty-Second Boyd” and may very well be the best pilot in the history of the U.S. Air Force.
Boyd relied heavily on a “quick and violent maneuver” he developed to solve a problem with the F-100 planes, the “adverse yaw problem.” This allowed him to quickly switch positions with another pilot on his tail, so that Boyd would be in the clear defensively and also able to “hose” or destroy his opponent.
Boyd later generalized this phenomenon from air combat in particular to strategy in general with the term “asymmetric fast transient,” which Richards elucidates as follows:
A “transient” is a shift from one state to another, “fast” refers to the time it takes to make the shift (not, as is often thought, the velocity of the aircraft itself), and “asymmetric” means that one side is better at it than the other… fast transients can be found in most any form of competition.
An asymmetric fast transient, like Boyd’s maneuvering of the F-100, is an astonishing and unexpected move to the unsuspecting opponent. It exemplifies excellent usage of the OODA loop concept, where one opponent can operate inside of the other’s OODA loop, with a faster rhythm than their opponent.
The Expected and the Unexpected
This phrase comes from the Chinese words cheng and ch’i. These words are sometimes translated as the expected and unexpected, or as the orthodox and unorthodox. Osinga also translates them as direct and indirect, regular and irregular, extraordinary and normal. Both Sun Tzu and Boyd emphasized cheng and ch’i, the expected and the unexpected, as critical maneuvers.
This concept is straightforward to understand. An enemy would likely expect you to fight them with weapons, but they might not expect you to poison their water supply. Or, for an example from business, Teslas have standard car features like chairs, but also include ‘bioweapon defense mode’ buttons. Chairs are expected. Biohazard modes are unexpected.
Success in any competitive domain requires a combination of expected and unexpected maneuvers. Tesla wouldn’t succeed if they skipped the chairs, or seatbelts. But including features like biohazard modes or a front-facing trunk or any of their other unexpected, unusual features means customers will be drawn to their product, and competitors will be caught off guard.
In the military domain, using a combination of the expected and the unexpected means that you can surprise your enemy, and achieve rapid victory while avoiding unnecessary harm through prolonged engagement.
Induction and Deduction
One aspect of the Orientation part of Boyd’s OODA loop is analysis and synthesis. This relates to deduction, or going from the general to the specific, and induction, or going from the specific to the general. By analyzing and synthesizing our observations and interpretations, we can generate new orientations towards what we are perceiving, so that we can act more effectively.
Boyd’s work demonstrated his mastery of analysis and synthesis. His work drew on a variety of influences, adapting them into a coherent synthetic account of strategy writ large. Osinga lists these influences in the following chronological diagram (p. 121):
Chet Richards has a similar diagram listing Boyd’s influences that is also helpful for seeing how they impacted Boyd’s thinking:
Complex Adaptive Systems
Each level of war can be interpreted through the lens of the OODA loop. Each individual, group, and nation has its own OODA loop or OODA loops, which are interacting with each other and evolving over time.
Boyd’s theory fits neatly with the development of complex adaptive systems, an idea which Boyd followed closely. According to Osinga, Boyd would interchangeably refer to armed forces as complex adaptive systems, organisms, systems, processes of transformations, and even brains.
Individuals or organizations that can understand themselves as complex adaptive systems are at a competitive advantage against those that do not.
Moral Warfare
Another important aspect of Boyd’s account of strategy is his emphasis on moral warfare. Like many of his ideas, this accords with his interest in and interpretation of Sun Tzu, the classical Chinese strategist.
Here, the moral doesn’t strictly mean the ethical sense, right and wrong. Boyd defined it in The Strategic Game of ? and ? as “the cultural codes of conduct or standards of behavior that constrain, as well as sustain and focus, our emotional/intellectual responses.”
To put it simply, the moral aspect of war or conflict can be described in terms of trust. If we are teammates or allies, can we trust each other? Do our enemies trust each other? Trust leads to effective collaboration and coordination; mistrust leads to failure. Therefore, the side with more shared trust will succeed.
The moral dimension of war can be weaponized. We can preserve the trust we have internally, while working to sow distrust amongst our enemies. One of the main ways this works is to point out the enemy’s hypocrisy, especially to their followers or citizens. Conversely, preserving one’s own integrity is a way to protect shared trust and therefore effectiveness.
Putting People First with Mission Command
One of Boyd’s famous quips was “People, ideas, hardware—in that order.” Boyd vehemently argued that “Machines don’t fight wars. Terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That’s where the battles are won.”
Because people are more important than ideas or hardware (including firepower, manpower, sheer quantitative superiority, etc.), one must understand psychology, leadership, and management.
From this perspective, micromanagement is poisonous. As Boyd said, “the more you try to control people, the less control you get.”
When we micromanage people, we are implicitly saying, “I don’t trust you.” While it might work in the short-term, micromanagement sows mutual distrust and the conditions for failure in the long-term.
Instead, our leadership style must be built on shared trust and understanding. This trust and understanding takes time to build, and can’t be built on the battlefield or at moments of crisis. Instead, it has to be earned through training and collaboration over time.
Boyd advocated for a leadership style from the Blitzkrieg style of warfare, the German Command and Control system. This form of leadership is often described in contemporary strategy as Mission Command.
In Mission Command, there is a superior and a subordinate. The specific setting doesn’t matter: it might be in the military, or a business, or some other setting. In any case, the superior and subordinate have a mutual relationship of shared trust and understanding, built over years of collaboration.
When a situation arises, the superior has a conversation with the subordinate. They present the situation as they understand it. They then propose a course of action to the subordinate, along with specific notes about requirements or constraints.
Having heard the situation and proposal, the subordinate has two choices. They can accept the mission outright. In this case, they have permission to accomplish the mission in whatever way seems best to them, provided they meet the requirements or constraints mentioned by their superior. They also have permission to adapt to the real-world circumstances that they find.
Their second option is to reject the mission as proposed by the commander, and make a counter-proposal. The subordinate may have reservations about the commander’s interpretation of the situation, or about their specific proposal.
It is their duty to provide their honest opinion about the situation, even if they disagree with their commander. Mission Command won’t work if the subordinate feels uncomfortable sharing their perspective. This is necessary for coming to a shared decision about what to do, at which point the subordinate’s support is expected.
One of the advantages of Mission Command is that it allows the subordinate to adapt the plan, which can be useful if new information arises or communication between the superior and the subordinate becomes impossible. The subordinate is actually on the front lines of a situation, and can combine the latest information with their understanding of the original intent or mission. This enables decentralized decision-making, which can be faster and more effective.
The adaptive and decentralized qualities of Mission Command depends on shared trust. This shared trust is a result of an emphasis on implicit over explicit communication. People and teams that know each other can communicate implicitly and efficiently, and when they are unable to communicate they can anticipate each other’s thoughts or responses to novel circumstances. This familiarity and trust is a result of training and exposure over time, and results in a fast, effective communication style.
FMFM-1 Warfighting gives specific suggestions about how to cultivate this trust over time:
“First, we should establish long-term working relationships to develop the necessary familiarity and trust.
Second, key people – ‘actuals’ – should talk directly to one another when possible, rather than through communicators or messengers.
Third, we should communicate orally when possible, because we communicate also in how we talk; our inflections and tone of voice.
And fourth, we should communicate in person when possible, because we also communicate through our gestures and bearing.”
Brown adds that these implicit shared knowledge can be trained “by giving [people] constant and repeated hands-on experience under a variety of conditions to build a repertoire of responses and, just as importantly, inculcate decision making and action as a habit.” This has to be developed during peacetime, so disjointed action in war can “all [aim] toward the common end state desired by the overall commander.”
I have described Mission Command and the German Command and Control System from the Blitzkrieg style of warfare in plain English language that will be understandable and useful even outside of the military context. But for those of you that choose to dive deeper into these ideas, it may be useful to note the German words for each of the concepts we have covered:
Einheit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion
Auftragstaktik: Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subordinate
Schwerpunkt: Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation
Nebenpunkt: Secondary points that support the Schwerpunkt or main focus
Fingerspitzengefühl: Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations
Fingerspitzengefühl covers the implicit or intuitive sense for how a novel circumstance should be approached with the intent or mission. While this is usually discussed in terms of an individual subordinate having fingerspitzengefühl for what they should do in a given situation,
Boyd also claimed that it is also desirable for there to be “organizational fingerspitzengefühl…you really want to operate like a family, and you’re a very large family… the whole family’s got the fingerspitzengefühl.”
Last week of April 22, Amadea’s fate still hanged in the balance. This stunning superyacht allegedly owned by a controversial Russian billionaire had supposedly made it to safety after having crossed the Pacific following the sanctions against Russia. But nearly a month later, the U.S. officially gets to decide what’s going to happen to it.
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Private blockchains operate on closed networks, and tend to work well for private businesses and organizations. Companies can use private blockchains to customize their accessibility and authorization preferences, parameters to the network, and other important security options. Only one authority manages a private blockchain network.
Public Blockchain Networks
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies originated from public blockchains, which also played a role in popularizing distributed ledger technology (DLT). Public blockchains also help to eliminate certain challenges and issues, such as security flaws and centralization. With DLT, data is distributed across a peer-to-peer network, rather than being stored in a single location. A consensus algorithm is used for verifying information authenticity; proof of stake (PoS) and proof of work (PoW) are two frequently used consensus methods.
Permissioned Blockchain Networks
Also sometimes known as hybrid blockchains, permissioned blockchain networks are private blockchains that allow special access for authorized individuals. Organizations typically set up these types of blockchains to get the best of both worlds, and it enables better structure when assigning who can participate in the network and in what transactions.
Consortium Blockchains
Similar to permissioned blockchains, consortium blockchains have both public and private components, except multiple organizations will manage a single consortium blockchain network. Although these types of blockchains can initially be more complex to set up, once they are running, they can offer better security. Additionally, consortium blockchains are optimal for collaboration with multiple organizations.
The Process of Transaction
One of Blockchain technology’s cardinal features is the way it confirms and authorizes transactions. For example, if two individuals wish to perform a transaction with a private and public key, respectively, the first person party would attach the transaction information to the public key of the second party. This total information is gathered together into a block.
The block contains a digital signature, a timestamp, and other important, relevant information. It should be noted that the block doesn’t include the identities of the individuals involved in the transaction. This block is then transmitted across all of the network's nodes, and when the right individual uses his private key and matches it with the block, the transaction gets completed successfully.
In addition to conducting financial transactions, the Blockchain can also hold transactional details of properties, vehicles, etc.
Here’s a use case that illustrates how Blockchain works:
Hash Encryptions
blockchain technology uses hashing and encryption to secure the data, relying mainly on the SHA256 algorithm to secure the information. The address of the sender (public key), the receiver’s address, the
. The encrypted information, called hash encryption, is transmitted across the world and added to the blockchain after verification. The SHA256 algorithm makes it almost impossible to hack the hash encryption, which in turn simplifies the sender and receiver’s authentication.
Proof of Work
In a Blockchain, each block consists of 4 main headers.
Previous Hash: This hash address locates the previous block.
Transaction Details: Details of all the transactions that need to occur.
Nonce: An arbitrary number given in cryptography to differentiate the block’s hash address.
Hash Address of the Block: All of the above (i.e., preceding hash, transaction details, and nonce) are transmitted through a hashing algorithm. This gives an output containing a 256-bit, 64 character length value, which is called the unique ‘hash address.’ Consequently, it is referred to as the hash of the block.
Numerous people around the world try to figure out the right hash value to meet a pre-determined condition using computational algorithms. The transaction completes when the predetermined condition is met. To put it more plainly, Blockchain miners attempt to solve a mathematical puzzle, which is referred to as a proof of work problem. Whoever solves it first gets a reward.
Mining
In Blockchain technology, the process of adding transactional details to the present digital/public ledger is called ‘mining.’ Though the term is associated with Bitcoin, it is used to refer to other Blockchain technologies as well. Mining involves generating the hash of a block transaction, which is tough to forge, thereby ensuring the safety of the entire Blockchain without needing a central system
recent years, you may have noticed many businesses around the world integrating Blockchain technology. But how exactly does Blockchain technology work? Is this a significant change or a simple addition? The advancements of Blockchain are still young and have the potential to be revolutionary in the future; so, let’s begin demystifying this technology.
Blockchain is a combination of three leading technologies:
Cryptographic keys
A peer-to-peer network containing a shared ledger
A means of computing, to store the transactions and records of the network
Cryptography keys consist of two keys – Private key and Public key. These keys help in performing successful transactions between two parties. Each individual has these two keys, which they use to produce a secure digital identity reference. This secured identity is the most important aspect of Blockchain technology. In the world of cryptocurrency, this identity is referred to as ‘digital signature’ and is used for authorizing and controlling transactions.
The digital signature is merged with the peer-to-peer network; a large number of individuals who act as authorities use the digital signature in order to reach a consensus on transactions, among other issues. When they authorize a deal, it is certified by a mathematical verification, which results in a successful secured transaction between the two network-connected parties. So to sum it up, Blockchain users employ cryptography keys to perform different types of digital interactions over the peer-to-peer network
Suppose you are transferring money to your family or friends from your bank account. You would log in to online banking and transfer the amount to the other person using their account number. When the transaction is done, your bank updates the transaction records. It seems simple enough, right? There is a potential issue which most of us neglect.
These types of transactions can be tampered with very quickly. People who are familiar with this truth are often wary of using these types of transactions, hence the evolution of third-party payment applications in recent years. But this vulnerability is essentially why Blockchain technology was created.
Technologically, Blockchain is a digital ledger that is gaining a lot of attention and traction recently. But why has it become so popular? Well, let’s dig into it to fathom the whole concept.
Record keeping of data and transactions are a crucial part of the business. Often, this information is handled in house or passed through a third party like brokers, bankers, or lawyers increasing time, cost, or both on the business. Fortunately, Blockchain avoids this long process and facilitates the faster movement of the transaction, thereby saving both time and money.
Most people assume Blockchain and Bitcoin can be used interchangeably, but in reality, that’s not the case. Blockchain is the technology capable of supporting various applications related to multiple industries like finance, supply chain, manufacturing, etc., but Bitcoin is a currency that relies on Blockchain technology to be secure.
Blockchain is an emerging technology with many advantages in an increasingly digital world:
Highly Secure
It uses a digital signature feature to conduct fraud-free transactions making it impossible to corrupt or change the data of an individual by the other users without a specific digital signature.
Decentralized System
Conventionally, you need the approval of regulatory authorities like a government or bank for transactions; however, with Blockchain, transactions are done with the mutual consensus of users resulting in smoother, safer, and faster transactions.
Automation Capability
It is programmable and can generate systematic actions, events, and payments automatically when the criteria of the trigger are met
