Submitted by nsscadmin on
With the rising popularity of cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) Blockchain has also become a very popular subject among investors and those interested in finance overall. Most people that aren’t cryptocurrency adapters or ICO investors have a hard time understanding what blockchain is.
Blockchain, to put it as simply as possible, is a digital ledger that records transactions. Once verified a transaction is combined with other transactions to create a new block of data within the ledger. Each group of transactions adds a new block to the chain.
It started out recording Bitcoin transactions but has grown to also record other cryptocurrencies, contracts, financial records and numerous other things. The list of things that can be recorded using blockchain seems to be constantly growing.
The difference between blockchain and other digital ledgers that have come before it is that with blockchain once a transaction is recorded it is permanent and unalterable. This gives is unprecedented security against hackers changing data.
A blockchain is basically a spreadsheet of data that has been duplicated thousands or times across a large network of computers. It’s a little more complex than that, but we’re trying to be as simplistic as possible. Information held in a blockchain exists as a shared and continually reconciled database. As the information in the blockchain isn’t stored in one location it can’t be altered or changed by one user. To make a change to the information someone would need access to every network it is found on which makes it practically impossible to do.
So, what is blockchain? The simple answer to that could be the way we’ll record and save all financial transactions and maybe all forms of transactions and records in the near future.