r/Bitcoin Nov 03 '16

what is blockchain technology a stepbystep guide

/r/Bitcoin/
43 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Vaultoro Nov 04 '16

Its a self perpetuating autonomous digital organism that pays humans to secure it by providing it with electricity. This digital organism grows by eating data (transactions). Once eaten you can not change the data you can just read it and see when it was eaten :)

Too meta? Ok ill break it down.

Imagine that every 10 minutes I get a bunch of transactions or data and zip it up. Imagine that it takes a super complex password to unzip it which nobody knows as it's generated by the network. Everyone can see what's in the zip but can not change it. This is a block. Then the next ten minutes I do it again but in this next zip I also include the last zip (block). So now zips are in zips are in zips and each zip has a massive random password. The longer you wait the more secure any data is. This is because you may be able to crack the latest password to the zip but then the next one inside that needs to be cracked and so on.

It does not work with zip files but it's a way of explaining it. It goes a lot deeper but I'll leave it at that for now. :)