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- “The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” —– Don & Alex Tapscott, authors Blockchain Revolution (2016)
- Distributed encrypted database
- The blockchain is a distributed database like a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. This network is designed to regularly update this spreadsheet.
- Blockchain as Google Docs- shared documents
- A blockchain is a continuously growing ledger of facts, replicated across a peer-to-peer network. Facts can range from monetary transactions to content signatures. A blockchain is a distributed and a decentralized digital ledger that can be used to record transactions across numerous computers. This means that the record cannot be retroactively altered without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network. Each block in the BlockChain contains a hash pointer as a link or reference to a previous block, transaction data, and a timestamp. Blockchains are resistant to modification of the data. A Blockchain serves as an open and distributed ledger that can record transactions between different two parties a verifiable and permanent way.
- A Blockchain database consists of two kinds of records: blocks and transactions. Blocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed and encoded into a hash tree (a hash tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labeled with a data block, and every non-leaf node is labeled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes). Each block includes the hash of the previous block in the Blockchain, linking the two.