What is Blockchain Technology?

According to the authors of the Blockchain Revolution, Don, and Alex Tapscott, the blockchain “is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”

What the blockchain is, is a distributed database. To help you envision that, try to imagine a spreadsheet that has been copied thousands upon thousands of times to different computers on a network. Now try to imagine that the network has been designed in such a way that it updates the spreadsheet on a regular basis so that every computer on the network gets the updated copy and that is blockchain technology.

It does go quite a bit deeper than that, obviously. Any information that has been stored on the blockchain will exist as a database that is shared and is continually updated. Of course, this has some obvious benefits – for a start, the database doesn’t get stored in one location and this means that all the records on it are public and can very easily be verified. There is no central version, which makes it less likely, in fact nigh on impossible, that a hacker can gain access. Instead, the database is hosted by many computers, millions in fact, and the data can be accessed by anyone who has access to the internet.