The Blockchain

While the mainstream media has been busy speculating about prices and black market intrigues, they’ve missed the fact that beneath it all, cryptographers had quietly invented an entirely new set of technological primitives.

Blockchains (and the consensus protocols that support them) were invented as a result of developers trying to solve a bold problem: how to create digital, untraceable MONEY. By combining cryptography, game theory, economics, and computer science, they managed to create an entirely new set of tools for building decentralized systems.

But what they created will change much more than just how we exchange money. It’s going to change the entire world. And hardly anyone seems to notice.

What is a blockchain?
At its core, a blockchain is a surprisingly simple and elegant data structure. It’s basically just a linked list with one important augmentation — each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block. This creates an effectively unalterable chain of blocks and their fingerprints, stretching back to the original block.