Blockchain Unblocked— Part 0: The signal and the noise

3 min readFeb 2, 2022

“Yeah so I invest in NFTs”
“The crypto market is down today”
India is introducing its own Digital Currency!
“OMG Jason Derulo also has BoredApe now!”
“Tesla now accepts bitcoin”
“Blockchain is an environmental disaster waiting to happen”
“I earned $xx by mining yesterday, my GPU is mining for its own replacement haha”

…..

If you are living in 2022, you may have heard people say these phrases, or something similar at the very least. There are full fledged Instagram pages, reddit communities, discord servers, telegram channels and podcasts which talk about Blockchain and the entire crypto movement.

As a person who is completely new to the technology, it can be hard to decipher what all of these phrases mean, especially if you come from a non-tech background. So most of the time, when you are at a party, or on a team meet zoom call (its 2022, Covid still reigns supreme), and the dreaded “Crypto Convo” comes up, most people, including me, just smile and nod along. We feel lost, but most of the time, when we decide to do something about it and educate ourself on these new buzz words, the internet just ends up confusing us more. There are wayyy too many jargons and random terms out there. We watch youtube videos, which attempt their best to explain to us about what the Blockchain technology really is, but at the end of the day, we are still left feeling confused and rather overwhelmed.

I once googled — “What is mining”

The internet told me that

Blockchain “mining” is a metaphor for the computational work that nodes in the network undertake, in hopes of earning new tokens.

Um hello?

What work? What network? What are tokens? Why do these nodes need to “earn” tokens?

I said okay, I know from the whisper on the street, that Bitcoin is a form of currency, and money can be earned, so maybe tokens are Bitcoins?

Time to google again — “What is Bitcoin?”

Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.

Interesting concept, but who what when where how why??

Okay let me be straightforward — “what are crypto tokens/coins”

A crypto token is a virtual currency token or a denomination of a cryptocurrency. It represents a tradable asset or utility that resides on its own blockchain and allows the holder to use it for investment or economic purposes.
A crypto coin is the digital version of underlying value, which might be debatable, whereas tokens carry the asset or deeds. One can buy tokens with coins, but some tokens can carry more value than any of them.

Confused? So was I.

After a few hours of what I term as “recursive googling”, I came to the conclusion that the reason I am so daunted by Blockchain, is because there is TOO MUCH information about it in the web.

It takes hours of watching videos and reading articles to separate the signal from the noise.

In this series, I hope to explain the blockchain technology, in the way I wish I could have learnt it — with no assumptions and pre-requisites, and we will unblock Blockchain logically, stepwise. I will be writing articles as I learn, while also including information from various sources. I am in no way an expert in the technology.

Let us keep an open mind, and get started!