Replicated Ledgers- Everything You Should Know about Them

• Replicated Ledgers are a duplicate copy of the distributed ledger.
• These ledgers mitigate the risk of a single point of failure.  

Blockchains have advanced the database systems and created a boom over the digital world. Given their decentralized nature, they have paved their way to different aspects of our lives. Food supply chains, healthcare databases, Financial banking are some of these aspects. But, have you ever wondered why they are so impactful? It’s because of their distributed ledger all across the networks.

Blockchains use distributed ledger technologies to spread their database across various nodes of the network. A distributed ledger allows the blockchain to share and synchronize databases across several institutions, countries, or geographical sites. Now, the replicated ledger is the new advancement in the world of blockchains. 

Replicated ledgers are just a duplicate or photocopy of distributed ledgers facilitated across the various nodes of the network. It is shared across all members participating in the cryptocurrency network. To know more about them, we should deep dive into the wholesome concept of replicated ledger. 

Replicated Ledger – A duplicate copy of ledger

To make it simple, we should make a partition in the words and understand each one separately. So, “Replicated” means duplicate and “Ledger” means a record of a financial transaction. By summing up, it means the duplicate record of a financial transaction and in case of blockchain particularly database. Thus, the Replicated Ledger means the duplicate copy of a database or distributed ledger that is shared among all the members or nodes. 

In this system, the distributed ledgers are divided into master and slave ledger. Master ledgers includes authentic copies of blockchain information and the slave ledgers are the simple replications of these master ledgers,

More importantly, this type of ledger contains the exact same piece of information that is stored in the blocks of the original ledger. Additionally, these ledgers are immutable meaning that once data gets stored, then it cannot be changed and the whole system works on consensus protocol. 

What is the Need of the Replicated Ledger?

Its purpose is to mitigate the risks associated with sharing only a single copy of the blockchain ledger with all users of the network. It also prevents the risk of single point of failure by duplicating multiple times the original blockchains’s database. Single point of failure means one fault can close the whole operating system.  

Advantages of Replicated Ledger:

• They prevent the blockchain systems from single point of failure.
• They are decentralized and distributed in nature.
• The changes takes place in real time means that if one makes further updates it will be shown in all the replicated copies. 
• They are immutable.
• The consensus system of replicated ledgers reject the copies if something is altered or changed. 

Disadvantages of Replicated Ledger:

• The whole process is time-consuming as it takes time to make changes in the whole system of nodes.
• This type of process requires a well developed mechanism, which is somewhat missing in the case of this ledger.

Conclusion

Replicated ledgers are really a great innovation as they maintain a number of copies helping the whole system to prevent from  a single point of failure. As the system is not maintained by a single authority, it maintains the decorum of decentralization.