Everybody seems to be talking about the Blockchain, trying to use it as a conversation starter, or as the reason to rant about why the future is going to be so different from the terrible unfair world that we have now. ¨Elon Musk said Doge coin is going to be the currency of the future¨ and you just nod trying to understand what is a Doge and how in the world it could be considered a coin. The fact of the matter is that this technology is revolutionary, and yes, it is going to change a lot of things in this world. But simply adding the word Blockchain to your vocabulary without understanding it is not going to change anything, and it is clearly not going to help you. Our objective in these blogs will be to put, evidently complex concepts in simple words, trying to explain these in the way that we would have liked our teachers and our ¨crypto expert¨ friends to explain it to us (We all have one in our group).
So let’s start from the basics. What the hell is the Blockchain? The blockchain is a computer concept which first saw the light in 2008 when a mysterious personality going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent an email to a group of cryptographers containing the Bitcoin Whitepaper (a whitepaper is a document released by a crypto project that gives investors technical information about its concept, and a roadmap for how it plans to grow and succeed). We´ll get more into Bitcoin in the following blogs, for now we just need to know it was the first Blockchain, out of hundreds of Blockchains that exist today. Basically this computer concept is based on the idea of building an immutable shared database between thousands of computers across the world. This is important because nowadays, most of the information is stored in unique databases. Let’s think of all the data that Google has gathered (More data than our brain can think of), this data, which is extremely valuable, depends on Google, if Google goes down, the data goes down and everything will be lost. Blockchain proposes a solution to this by implementing a technology which uses thousands of computers that are able to verify and track every piece of information. This solution basically decentralizes control over data, meaning that if one computer of the network is hacked, compromised or goes down, there are thousands of others that can realize it, remove it from the network, and keep collecting and approving data securely. Instead of only having Google’s eyes to verify the correct functioning of a huge network, we now have thousands of eyes.
This is already a lot of information for our first blog, so we´ll leave you with a couple of takeaways that you should keep with you for your future, ¨the world is changing conversations¨.
-Information on the blockchain is Decentralized
-Uncensored
-Immutable
-Public
-All transactions must be validated by individuals in the network
Check out our next blog to get a grasp of cryptocurrencies, the scam, or the saviours of our society, depends on who you ask ;)
