A Super-Simplified Explanation Of Blockchains

Blockchain technology really isn’t all that hard to understand.

This new and innovative technology called blockchain is the most fundamental and disruptive development to grace the Web since the Web came into being.

What is a blockchain?

I remember the day clearly when I heard about the Worldwide Web for the first time. A friend of mine told me about it. He said there was this computer application called Netscape that would read something called HTML code from any IP address and translate it into a page layout with photos and text. He said it would be a disruptive technology and put America Online and Compuserve out of business (yeah, I’m that old).

Of course, my next questions were, “What’s an IP address? What’s HTML?” That’s when he took me down the proverbial rabbit hole. The deeper we went down the rabbit hole, the more complex the answers got and the less I actually understood them.

If we dive into any complex topic too deeply too quickly, our proverbial heads explode. We exit the rabbit hole still perplexed. But if someone were to give us a super-simplified explanation — a foundation upon which we can…