At the time, a pending change to the blockchain, or transaction ledger, attached to each bitcoin was causing anxiety among traders.
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The use of blockchain, a transaction ledger that underpins virtual currency bitcoin, could help reduce delays and manual errors, Commerzbank said on Thursday.
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Firms like EncrypGen, Nebula Genomics, LunaDNA and Zenome are using blockchain - the technology behind Bitcoin - to secure sensitive DNA records and create a transaction ledger.
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However, it would be difficult to verify them using the Bitcoin blockchain, the somewhat public transaction ledger, because services like Coinbase pool their transactions, he said.
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The difficulty of these tasks protects the integrity of the system: anyone seeking to rewrite bitcoin's transaction ledger would face the monumental burden of repeating them.
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Traders are also still celebrating the successful "fork" earlier this month of the underlying blockchain, or transaction ledger, that helps bitcoin function as a store of value.
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The global bitcoin market is also facing uncertainty over a proposed software change at the end of the month that would affect the transaction ledger, or blockchain, attached to each coin.
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Which is exactly what speculators have been doing, especially since the successful rollout earlier this month of a big change to the underlying blockchain technology that works as a transaction ledger for bitcoins.
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Buterin is a co-founder and inventor of Ethereum, described as a "decentralised mining network and software development platform rolled into one" that facilitates the creation of new cryptocurrencies and programs that share a single blockchain (a cryptographic transaction ledger). Buterin first described Ethereum in a white paper in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language.
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Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires consensus of the network majority. Although blockchain records are not unalterable, blockchains may be considered secure by design and exemplify a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Decentralized consensus has therefore been claimed with a blockchain. Blockchain was invented by a person (or group of people) using the name Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to serve as the public transaction ledger of the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
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In a decentralized system, the double-spending problem is significantly harder to solve. To avoid the need for a trusted third party, many servers must store identical up-to-date copies of a public transaction ledger, but as transactions (requests to spend money) are broadcast, they will arrive at each server at slightly different times. If two transactions attempt to spend the same token, each server will consider the first transaction it sees to be valid, and the other invalid. Once the servers disagree, there is no way to determine true balances, as each server's observations are considered equally valid.
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