Hello Steemians! This is the Steemit engagement season 11, and this is the fourth week. I am very delighted to take part in this contest organized by the steemit crypto academy.

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First of all, Let's Begin With What the "Genesis Blockchain" is all about.

Steem is one of the blockchain in the world if not the biggest. From the word "Genesis", which means the origin of something, you can actually guess what Genesis Blockchain is all about. A developer whose name is Satoshi Nakamoto created the Genesis Block in 2009.

Genesis Blockchain is the name of the first block in cryptocurrency. A blockchain contains or consists of different blocks which are used to store information relating to cryptocurrency. Different cryptocurrency transactions can be carried out in a blockchain. I hope you are following.
In order to explore the Genesis block of the steam blockchain I visited steemworld.org

The next thing to do is to sign in using the steem username and posting key as the password

After that,select the block explorer on the home screen and type 1, which signifies the first block on the steem blockchain

Finally we have this, which shows the block details

Steem Genesis Block Time.

The genesis block for Steem blockchain is on 2016-03-24, 09:05:00. It takes 3 seconds for a block to be produced by a block producer on a Steem blockchain. We can make use of steemblockexplorerin order to calculate the steem blockchain time.

This is how to calculate the total time in a Steem blockChain;
The last block produced on the steem blockchain as of today August 21, 2023, at 1:05 am (WAT) is 77,434,748.

77,434,748 - block 1 = 77,434,747
since 3 seconds = 1 block
77,434,747 * 3 = 232,304,244 seconds
In minute, we have it to be;
1 minute= 60 seconds
232,304,244/60 = 3,871,737 minutes
3,871,737/60= 64,528 hours
64,528/24= 2,688 days

What is Downtime of a BlockChain?

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The downtime of a blockchain can be seen as the time in which the blockchain is down or not functioning properly. When downtime occurs, delay in cryptocurrency transactions is bound to also occur. It can also make users of blockchain technology (you and me) to be unable to assess our digital assets. The downtime of a blockchain is disastrous.

Reasons Downtime of a BlockChain can occur

1. Network Congestion: When high transaction is observed in a blockchain, it can overload the network, which would eventually slow the network down.
2. Failure of the Hardware: Asides from network failure, once the hardware of the blockchain fails, it would lead to the downtime of the blockchain.
3. Cyber Attacks: There's nothing in this world that has 100% security. Once there is an attack by hackers, users will experience downtime. Most of the time, different policies will be made in order to mitigate the issue.
4. Power Outage: This is also a major problem that contributes to the downtime of a blockchain. BlockChains run on a consistent power supply, there shouldn't be any power outage even for a second in order for the blockchain the run smoothly as millions of persons perform transactions every second.

The Steem BlockChain Downtime.

Like every other blockchain, the Steem blockchain has different measures to prevent downtime, sadly, these measures sometimes fail. The steem blockchain has experienced some downtime.
Last 3 years, as of September 2019, the Steem blockchain experienced downtime for 10 hours due to a bug. Although funds were not lost, users weren't able to assess their funds at that particular period of time. Another case of Steem blockchain downtime occurred on December 2019 due to an excessively high transaction rate, which led to the overload of the nodes, thus slowing down the network.