*https://vas3k.com/blog/blockchain/*
vas3k, November 2017
Two years ago I wrote a post called “Brave Decentralized World” mainly focused on the subject of decentralized networks. It was packed with a brief history of Fidonet, Napster, Gnutella, TOR, BitTorrent with its DHT extension, and there I spoke just a bit about the blockchain concept.
Nowadays, when a half of my friends are playing on crypto-exchanges, and the other half – preparing for ICOs, surprisingly, only a few of them understand the blockchain internal mechanisms. This article sheds some light on this topic.
Today I want to tell you why did blockchain appear, how is the cryptocurrency world organized and why is it the smartest system in terms of pure logic during past years. You’ll find out below.
I am far from the hype around bitcoin or stock exchange courses. Blockchain for me is just a speck of technology. New, strange, tricky, but it seems to be moving the world, unlike other stories. Apparently, it will stick around for a long time.
I wrote this post like if I were explaining blockchain to my parents. Even if my non-techie friends were here surfing over the shoulder, surely, they would figure it out.
Here is my buddy Bill. He’ll help me to illustrate what I am about to say. And if he blows it, we’ll kick him out
The concept of blockchain was first introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in his article Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. On as little as 8 pages, the author explained the entire system of bitcoin cryptocurrency based on the blockchain algorithm.
<aside> ⛓️ Blockchain was born as a constitutive part of the bitcoin system, but its principles can be applied and modified independently. Anyone can stock up a personal blockchain, even from the laptop.
</aside>
Blockchain is a chain of blocks or, in other words, it’s a linked list. Each entry in this list is linked to the previous one and so on it connects transitively to the very first one. Think of it as train car analogy where each one is chained to the next one. There is a worth reading Russian article by Nikita Likhachev, where the same concept is spelled out for mere newcomers. My analogies are partially borrowed from there.