I’ve been frustrated finding an adequate description of blockchain to go along with a blog posted a few days ago.
Nothing I've seen seems to help me conceptualize it.
The reason is that a blockchain is based on two completely new technologies that few people are aware we have lived with. And I hadn’t paid attention to these either.
One is massive number processing. The other is distributed autonomous networking.
Most people can picture a number that is eleven digits long. That is because we see that number of digits in U.S. government budget numbers and the dollar value of shares of public stock; eleven digits, it represents the number ‘a few billion’.
When we download a file to our phone in less than a second it can contain millions of digits. Not eleven digits. Tens of millions of digits. An everyday experience we haven’t really internalized in our mind. A string of digits that would reach around an average city block.
When we put a date on our phone calendar it can instantly be put on our home computer, our friend’s calendar, our tablet and our office computer. That is autonomous networking. It could involve thousands of computers if we are on a network with that many synchronized computers. Autonomous networking happens every time we put a card in a transit card reader. Again an everyday experience we have not really internalized in our mind.
Blockchain is based on just these two realities of modern life. A blockchain is a long list of numbers, often billions of numbers in a single chain. That set of numbers can include a series of financial transactions, it could be a series of owners of a plot of land, with a description of the plot of land, it could be a patent, the entire score of a movie or a Broadway musical. None of these are large in terms of contemporary computers.
And this chain of numbers could be duplicated simultaneously on thousands of computers (or more) to make sure that the number remains accurate and can be accessed easily to verify anything contained in the number.
That is what a blockchain is about. A reality of the modern world that is currently being put to use. Many uses.
If you want a copy of your bitcoin, which is just a very long number that has been copied on thousands of computers around the world, you need a thumb-drive to record it.
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