How does the Blockchain process create trust in the absence of a central database?
The Blockchain ledger process is trusted because of the strong cryptography used to generate difficult to find hash numbers that vouch for the integrity and authenticity of each block in the shared database of transactions, blocks, distributed among the network. Because of this, the transactions require some important properties that are supplied by the design of the Blockchain:
• Irreversible - no one can reverse a transaction once it is sent and confirmed by the network.
• Pseudonymous - There is nothing in the transaction that associates it with any real world entity.
• Fast and global - The transactions are sent world wide very quickly, and the confirmations happen quickly and are sent to the whole network.
• Secure - Public key cryptography is a well known system that uses very large numbers to generate hash values over the data that makes the data impossible to change without altering the hash value.
• Permissionless - No one owns the cryptocurrency, so no one can demonetize it.