14 Things Everyone Should Know About Blockchains

In the simplest of terms, blockchain is just a new form of decentralized database.

You can think of blockchain as the “internet of value.” It’s a real-time ledger of anything that can be recorded (financial transactions, contracts, physical assets, supply chain info, etc.) but there is no one person or organization in charge of the entire chain. In fact, it’s open and everyone in the chain can see the detail of each record—what’s known as a block. Each block is time stamped and encrypted; the only person who can edit a block is the one that “owns” it. Owners gain access to their block through a private key that only they have. When there are changes to an individual block, everyone’s distributed blockchain is updated and syncs in real time.