The Doppler Quarterly Winter 2018 | Page 22

• T his message can represent any asset type, such as currency or other digital assets. 3. This transaction is then sent out into the blockchain world for validation and entry into the actual ledger. • The combination of the message, the unique signature, and my public key is validated by encryption technology. • If there’s any attempt to modify the content of the message or the sig- nature, the validation will fail—so I know I can trust the content. At this point, I’ve signed Scrooge’s little black book. Now I need to get the trans- action recorded in the ledger. Trusting a “Trustless Trust” Ledger In Scrooge’s world, transactions are entered into his ledger by Bob Cratchit. Bob trusts Scrooge as the source of the transactions, and Scrooge trusts Bob to transcribe the transactions sequentially into his ledger. In the blockchain world, not only does that relationship not exist, but the led- ger also exists on all participants’ systems within the blockchain. So the partic- ipants must reach a consensus on whether or not to add the transaction into the blockchain. This is accomplished through advanced cryptographic algo- 20 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2018