What Is the Blockchain and What's it Used For?
At this point, most people have at least heard of blockchain, but it's become something of a running gag about how complex the technology can be to understand. You probably associate the technology with Bitcoin, but while this was the first real-world application of blockchain technology, it's far from the only use case. What is blockchain? While some people equate the invention of blockchain with Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakomota, the concept has been around since 1991, first coined in an article by researchers Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta entitled "How to Timestamp a Digital Document “. Also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT), the blockchain is a record that anyone can add, that nobody can change, and that is not controlled by any one person or entity. The core concept is a public ledger with copies distributed across multiple sites, called nodes, which typically refer to individual computers with copies of the ledger. This is wh...
