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Crypto-what?
If you've attempted to dive into this mysterious thing called blockchain, you would be forgiven for recoiling in horror at the sheer opaqueness of the technical jargon that's often used to frame it. So before we get into just what a crytpocurrency is and how blockchain technology might change the world, let's discuss what blockchain happens to be.

In the easiest terms, a blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions, not unlike the ledgers we've been using for hundreds of years to record sales and purchases. The event of the digital ledger is, actually, pretty much identical to a traditional ledger for the reason that it records debits and credits between people. This is the core concept behind blockchain; the difference is who holds the ledger and who verifies the transactions.

With traditional transactions, a payment from one person to another involves some kind of intermediary to facilitate the transaction. Suppose Rob really wants to transfer �20 to Melanie. He is able to either give her profit the proper execution of a �20 note, or he is able to use some kind of banking app to transfer the money directly to her bank account. In both cases, a bank is the intermediary verifying the transaction: Rob's funds are verified when he takes the money out of a cash machine, or they are verified by the app when he makes the digital transfer. The bank decides if the transaction should go ahead. The lender also holds the record of most transactions created by Rob, and is solely responsible for updating it whenever Rob pays someone or receives money into his account. Quite simply, the bank holds and controls the ledger, and everything flows through the lender.

That's a large amount of responsibility, so it is important that Rob feels he is able to trust his bank otherwise he would not risk his money using them. He needs to feel confident that the lender will not defraud him, will not lose his money, will never be robbed, and can not disappear overnight. Best Wallet For Ethereum on trust has underpinned pretty much every major behaviour and facet of the monolithic finance industry, to the extent that even when it was discovered that banks were being irresponsible with this money during the financial meltdown of 2008, the federal government (another intermediary) chose to bail them out instead of risk destroying the final fragments of trust by permitting them to collapse.

Blockchains operate differently in one key respect: they are entirely decentralised. There is no central clearing house just like a bank, and there is absolutely no central ledger held by one entity. Instead, the ledger is distributed across a vast network of computers, called nodes, each of which holds a copy of the entire ledger on their respective hard drives. These nodes are linked to one another via a piece of software called a peer-to-peer (P2P) client, which synchronises data over the network of nodes and makes certain that everybody gets the same version of the ledger at any given time