What’s a blockchain for those who can’t read for more than 2 minutes straight
Bitcoin is made out of a blockchain. A blockchain is a big database. Basically it’s just a big Excel spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet stores every Bitcoin transaction ever made:
- the date of the transaction
- the Bitcoin address of the sender (basically a bank account number)
- the Bitcoin address of the receiver
- the amount sent
Here is a simplified example of what the Bitcoin blockchain looks like:
Here we have 5 different Bitcoin addresses (bank account). Let’s assume each address had 50 BTC to start with.
Anyone can read the blockchain (the spreadsheet) and easily calculate the balance of each bank account by reading the transactions:
- 1FJJgwoa4euS7aBpv84uBwLreFmJPwBdZy has 50-0.01 = 49.9 BTC
- 35cVF6hZwXF3oxa3yS3jhoQRt1gzxoZhxM has 50–49 = 1 BTC
- 1JNGUd95wW66Pone6n4f1giMhtFZNqCu64 has 50–1.245=48.755 BTC
- 1737a3f86vF46rGXQPUuKGLMJTcWNDsw2y has 50+0.01+49=99.01 BTC
- 1KJDckyDF54pH65quicuyCK7UH4Af7Wtpp has 50+1.245=51.245 BTC
Everyone can also add a new transaction to the blockchain (that’s how you transfer money). But once a transaction is written, nobody can erase it.
That’s it. That’s what a blockchain is.
Is it really that simple?
No. If you want to see so real-life Bitcoin transactions, you can visualize them in a blockchain explorer, for example here. Don’t worry if not everything makes sense just yet, just see that there are some transactions.
There are also a lot of other technical notions coming into play that I have not discussed: blocks, mining, smart contracts, …
I like to think I suffer from attention disorder so not only I can’t read long articles, but I can’t write them either. I might write other very simple and short articles to cover these notions. Or not. If it happens to be the case, I will put the links here ⬇️⬇️⬇️
- Where is the blockchain stored?
- Have another question? Ask in the comments and I will try to answer with a very short article!
