You may have heard about blockchain, quite possibly, like me you first heard of it in relation to something called crypto currency or bitcoin.

Bitcoins are apparently a bit like pound coins except they don’t go out of date, don’t really exist, but apparently they’re worth something. I have sneaking suspicion how much they’re worth depends on whether you’re selling or buying.. but to be honest any conversation about bitcoins involves having to define what money actually is.. this gets really complicated and guarantees an argument, a headache or both.

So I’m going to park bitcoins and just talk about blockchains.

Definition of blockchain – Continuously growing list of records which are linked and secured using cryptography. Typically each block contains a pointer to the previous block, a timestamp and transaction data.

One idea behind blockchain is that the can serve as an inherently open distributed ledger recording a series of transactions between two parties. (Hope you’re following this).

From the above (if you’re still with me) you can see that block chains are inherently resistant to modification or change. (In other words you’ve got to know quite a bit about your block chain, before you could even consider changing the data). Furthermore once recorded you cannot go back and amend the data retrospectively, without altering all subsequent blocks and for that, it is said the you would need a “collusion of the network majority” (what a wonderful phrase!).

In other words, for those of us who remember Tippex, there’s no going back and airbrushing out transactions that you don’t like. There’s no, cooking the books, fudging the figures or dressing up the data in any way.

In own way our online data room Collabor8online builds its own simple blockchain. Once uploaded to the system, any document, image or file is stored securely. If that document is updated, its version number is incremented, with the original and indeed all prior versions being kept intact and visible to administrators.

What is more any action is recorded in the systems “activity audit”. So system administrators cannot only control who can see what, they can see who did what and when, and indeed what they did it to.

If you’re looking for an online data room that’s safe and secure to store your transactional data. click call any of the numbers below. We’d be delighted to hear from you.

How Does it work? All about permissions 

If you’d like to know more about Collabor8online click or call 020 3369 6491.