I am trying to better understand the fundamentals of the BLOCKCHAIN. I am not technical and am hoping someone can offer up an explanation in LAY TERMS.
Thanks in advance.
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2possible duplicate of Can someone explain how the Bitcoin Blockchain works?, What is the Blockchain?– Murch ♦Feb 23, 2014 at 2:35
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related: Why is blockchain necessary?– Murch ♦Feb 23, 2014 at 2:40
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1 Answer
There is a nice explanation on how it works in the bitcoin wiki, bitcoin.it :
A block chain is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in a system based on the Bitcoin protocol. A full copy of a currency's block chain contains every transaction ever executed in the currency. With this information, one can find out how much value belonged to each address at any point in history.
Every block contains a hash of the previous block. This has the effect of creating a chain of blocks from the genesis block to the current block. Each block is guaranteed to come after the previous block chronologically because the previous block's hash would otherwise not be known. Each block is also computationally impractical to modify once it has been in the chain for a while because every block after it would also have to be regenerated. These properties are what make double-spending of bitcoins very difficult. The block chain is the main innovation of Bitcoin.
