Letter #15: Blockchain - A Worldwide Revolution in Data and Value Transfer

Read now to learn what blockchain is and how it’s driving value for humanity with its revolutionary technology.

Dear Readers,

Bitcoin can be found everywhere these days. Your friends are investing in it, your store wants to trade its goods to you in exchange for it, and your bank wants to make a profit off of it. Bitcoin has a variety of use cases, but what enables Bitcoin to actually work and what makes it so secure? The answer is a revolutionary new technology called Blockchain.

The ABCs of Blockchain

At its core, a blockchain is simply a ledger, or record, of every transaction that has ever occurred on the network. Any network participant can broadcast a transaction to the blockchain, like a transfer of Bitcoin to an artist in exchange for a piece of art, and have it confirmed and added to the blockchain by the nodes that support the network. Transactions that are broadcast to the network around the same time are grouped together into “blocks”, time stamped to help order the block correctly on the blockchain, and then connected to the preceding block to form the complete chain of all transactions.

The purpose of a blockchain is to store information, and in that regard it can seem similar to databases that support your favorite apps like Twitter or YouTube. However, there are a variety of features inherent to the Bitcoin blockchain that set it apart from other types of databases: