imagine a chain. ok jokes aside. a blockchain works off the backbone of "miners" which are just computers taking in transactions and calculating them for a specific "proof" which is used to validate that transaction. funny complex encrypty thingys are done during the whole process and it all ends up linking off eachother. each transaction is just another link in the whole chain. that's about as basic as it gets without having to explain the actual process or how it all works. It actually doesn't work as a currency on it's own because the blockchain keeps a permanent record of every single fucking transaction ever done. so the blockchain gets dummy thick real fast and the bigger it is the harder the authenticate process is meaning transactions could literally take upto weeks or more. what most people end up actually interfacing with when it comes to crypto is brokers, which work similar to stock brokers of such. you get a shit load of "i owe u"s from the broker which pinky promises in it's large wallet to hold a position for you in the blockchain in your behalf. There is also nothing stopping anyone from forking off the blockchain into it's own thing and tweaking a few properties while at it. so a large broker could literally decide one day to instead of paying out actual bitcoin they'll pay you in "bitcache" instead. Smaller crypto currencies also have a tendency to be massive scams, since a lot of them are done exclusively through single point of failure brokers which could literally just turn around at any moment and run with your money. Case point, bitcoin is actually kind of shit and overall a massive meme. it's carried mostly on meme status then anything. **which i suppose all currencies are The only thing blockchains are useful for is tricking a bunch of idiots into hosting CP by making them think it's a currency thing. there is an actual method of encoding images into bitcoin's blockchain and once there they can never be removed. there is literal CP on bitcoin right now.

>>3197 (OP) A blockchain entry(ie. a block) is a piece of data that is marked with crypto bullshit that only makes sense if you have every other block that was used in the process of marking it with the crypto bullshit. When a new entry is added into the 'chain' you just take every other block before that one and push it through the crypto bullshit. This lets everyone check the chain for correctness/pull out entries because if someone has a different/missing entry their crypto bullshit won't match. Thats...kind of it. A blockchain is just a way for a bunch of 'independent' systems to agree on something,which is a surprisingly hard thing to do.

>>3197 (OP) Glossing over the finer points, aren't they just a distributed digital ledger of transactions on multiple computers that requires consensus over the majority to accept and ratify any proposed change? Usually they're paired with some algorithmic way to gain more currency, with nearly all implementations thusfar involving wasting energy and computer power on solving difficult and meaningless problems ("proof of work") as a sign of investment in the system. The nature of this tends to vary between coin type, but many make these problems harder as the money supply increases to ensure that oversupply doesn't destroy existing value. Hence why Bitcoin transactions take so long; you need to create consensus by speaking with a majority of the nodes on the network to ensure that your transaction is well known, and hence the notion of the 50% attack where if you control half of the nodes on the network, you can control the truth and therefore reallocate money as you see fit. Accordingly, most of the efforts in improving this technology is to find a way to make the mechanism less involved for individual participants, as we can see what happened to Bitcoin (transactions take forever and cost a lot) whilst still secure, and also to find a new way to issue currency without forcing people to waste monstrous amounts of energy on useless calculations, as this attracts a lot of criticism.

literally just a file that gets passed around in a network with an if statement for write permission normies think thats mega double ultra cool and super smart

have fun staying poor

If this is a cryptocurrency thread in disguise, what wallets do any of you use? Or is there any reason why I should avoid them altogether?

>>3360 >have fun staying poor You know crypto was invented to be used as a currency, not an investment right?

A Blockchain is a method to build a Trustless distributed transactional database. If you want Transactions and consistency, you usually need a central entity, that decides the 'truth' (e.g. i saw that operation before this operation, even though you received it in a different order die to network stuff). That central entity is a weakness, because it can break, or decide to change the rules it operates under. In a Blockchain, the defining entity moves between all the participating miners. The whole Proof of work stuff is mainly there, to reduce the chance of multiple miners creating a block at the same time. (super tldr version of first gen blockchains)

>>3197 (OP) im sure youve already gotten the answer but: its a digital ledger. imagine a guestbook at a church or something but each entry is a transaction between to accounts. every transaction is listed so anyone with a copy of the guestbook can calculate the unspent tokens associated with all the addresses. this book can also contain scripts known as smart contracts. the bigger the script, the more you will have to pay. transactions are verified on a consistant schedule through consensuses with everyone that has a current version of the book

>>3369 what it was created for doesnt matter. thats the type of logic normies use to discredit something in current year by saying "oh it was created by this bad guy or to serve this purpose that was bad and here why it changing into something better doesnt matter"

it's a public database for when you don't feel like trusting the people who run it, or the other people who might be using it. very limited use cases outside of just currency. like a traditional SQL database, a blockchain can accept multiple data types and different kinds of schemas. the second thing anyone ever tried to do with it is domains, and that might become more useful as governments and traditional domain registrars become more strict. like a traditional SQL database, a blockchain can also accept stored procedures and triggers, which other people can later interact with. this can be used to automate different types of financial instruments, which used to require banks and other types of middlemen. to participate in running a blockchain, you have to do a lot of something that takes effort, own a lot of something that is scarce, or both. on top of that you also have to seed a copy of the database to other users, and only allow stuff to be added to it if it follows the same rules that others are following. if you allow something into your copy of the database that most other people would not allow, they won't be able to see your updates anymore. consequently, they won't be able to acknowledge any rewards or transaction fees you subsequently collect. you get kicked out of the network. if enough people want to agree to change the rules, then it becomes the new rules. sometimes the database isn't really open to new participants, and only a single company or a handful of companies are allowed to maintain it. sometimes the database is allowed to grow at such a fast rate that it becomes too difficult for new participants to join in and help run it. this harms decentralization. conversely, if you make the requirements for participating too low, the database won't be able to handle a lot of users. the existing users will want to outbid each other to get their data included in a limited amount of space, causing fees to spike, driving activity to other databases. you can't just make the growth or space infinite. nobody knows the correct rate of growth. 2 megabytes every 10 minutes or 20 or 200, nobody actually knows the optimal number. but if you somehow hit that number and wanted more space, you would have to find a way to offload the transactions to a different type of system that is somehow connected to the main blockchain, without compromising on too many of the rules and protections for the data. this is extremely hard and only a few blockchains are trying to do it. most of them either don't have enough traffic to justify it or their devs are too lazy to attempt it.

Yes yes it has been described a bunch of times already, but blockchains are the most important innovation of our generation. Blockchain - To make it as simple as possible, it's an architecture for a decentralized ledger where all computers/servers/nodes (same thing) each have a copy of all transactions that happened in that blockchain's lifetime. There is complexity involved in how all nodes agree on the history of transactions and this all necessary to enable digital currencies. Now the biggest innovation of blockchain tech is not only creating viable electronic currencies, but the creation of smart contracts. Smart contracts are programs that run on blockchains and once you deploy them onchain, you can verify how exactly it works (EZ PZ if they publish the code in tandem with deploying it), anyone can interaction with the smart contract and not even the contract deployer and prevent people from using it unless they developed clear mechanisms which would be clearly written in the code to block people from using it. This creates an environment where a developer can prove anything he says the program can or can't do. "Don't worry, this doesn't save your email!", publish your code and we'll verify this directly. More importantly, the biggest benefit of all this is that you can write smart contracts (or decentralized apps or dapps) to easily interact with other dapps already deployed onchain. That last part I'm positive a good 85% of the entire blockchain industry doesn't fully grasp. They get as far as the immutable part, where you can't change things once you deploy it, but the concept of you can build stuff ontop of someone else's stuff is woefully underutilized. https://pooltogether.com/ Check this site out. What this site is is a dapp that lets you pool together your savings with other people for a basically a lottery chance of winning money. It's a risk free saving's account otherwise. Let me explain: There are lending platforms where you can lend Ethereum (ETH) or USDC (US dollar stable coin) or other US dollar stable coin variants and they pay you a 10% interest rate for your troubles. Way better than leaving your money in a checking account with 0% interest and better than digging for some bank that gives you 5% or something. If you got $100K in savings in crypto, lend it out and get $10K a year. Cool. Mind you, Pooltogether uses Aave, the biggest and most secure lending platform currently. You can find higher lending rate platforms but you're taking a risk due to the lack of assurance in security. Most people don't have $100K, so Pooltogether says "hey, you all can pool your meager sums together and each week so we can collectively get a nice interest rate accrual and someone gets to walk home with that accrual each week!". So imagine if there was $3.65M in the pool. Each week, someone could win $10K. Everyone gets nothing, but it's a 0% saving's account otherwise. This type of stuff is the power of blockchain technology. This is Web3; where each dapp is composable and you build upon other dapps to create completely new products that are otherwise totally unfeasible for the current banking world or Web2. Web3 can already do what Web2 does in Uber, Airbnb, whatever big name you can think of, the tools are out there to recreate it. But the other way around? HA. Yeah I'm super passionate about blockchain tech, but I swear this tech is too big brained for the majority of the participants in the industry.

>>17895 And more importantly, these fucking people need Jesus.

it's an extremely simple concept >you have 10 friends >make a list of everybody's current funds >make a list of IOU's + payments between friends >all friends copy-paste the list >every time funds change or a transfer is made between friends, all friends make the same updates to the list >friends regularly compare lists to make sure they ar all identical and current now the reality of it >scams

>>17895 and how exactly do these "smort contracts" keep executing, every week, on their own, huh? And who pays for the computing power required to keep them up and running?

>>17914 >scams You're thinking of cryptocurrencies While they are built on blockchains, it's not blockchain tech itself that's the scam. If we're nitpicking, it really boils down to Indians, just gotta keep them away from crypto.

>>17895 >This creates an environment where a developer can prove anything he says the program can or can't do. "Don't worry, this doesn't save your email!", publish your code and we'll verify this directly. I'm unclear on this, this doesn't seem unique to blockchains. As I understand it all smart-contract blockchain does is enforce validity that a given program, and therefore any corresponding smart contract, was in fact correctly executed when committed to its blockchain. >More importantly, the biggest benefit of all this is that you can write smart contracts (or decentralized apps or dapps) to easily interact with other dapps already deployed onchain. >That last part I'm positive a good 85% of the entire blockchain industry doesn't fully grasp. They get as far as the immutable part, where you can't change things once you deploy it, but the concept of you can build stuff ontop of someone else's stuff is woefully underutilized. >Yeah I'm super passionate about blockchain tech, but I swear this tech is too big brained for the majority of the participants in the industry. How passionate is "super passionate" here? Do you work on blockchain? I think like most cryptography the tech is simultaneously severely overrated and severely underrated. I find even competent computer scientists struggle to understand exactly how it works, a fact which is not helped by the lack of clarity when discussing the underlying technology. If "passionate" is more than just being a fanboy, I am more than casually interested myself.

>>3197 (OP) Blockchains are a solution to a problem nobody had, marketers need to invent problems before blockchains can solve them, many things that "need" a blockchain can be solved with traditional architectures with way less headaches, unless it's handling virtual currency, that's the only legit use of a blockchain.

>>18921 Wrong, without blockchain you wouldn't have Monero (only way to make anonymous payments online) >>18921 >>18921

>>3197 (OP) blockchain is some kind of database, some kind of ledger, that's all there is to it, and it is useless by itself, bitcoin made the term widespread because it uses blockchain as a way to store its data blockchain is an extremely irrelevant part of what makes bitcoin, which is the greatest political revolution since a very long time, which essentially allows people to have money and payment without a centralized third party (or a bank), parasites will try to downplay bitcoin and call it slow (wrong), inefficient (wrong), energy inefficient (wrong), and so on ponzi stocks investors will seethe also, gold investors will not like it because it will eat a lot of its market cap, old people will tend to dislike it because many just dislike computers, etc some people are saying that monero is an evolution of bitcoin, it has pros and cons but I like it cannot talk about blockchain without talking about bitcoin

>>3197 (OP) >And, more importantly, how they operate outside of just functioning as a currency? They don't [function as currency] though. That experiment failed. They are merely speculative assets/toys.

>>>>>>>>>>>the entire thing And who will run it? Or on what?

>Can someone actually explain, in layman's terms, what blockchain actually are? It's a ledger. On a bunch of people's computers at the same time. Spending money requires updating the ledger. Updating the ledger requires solving some cryptographic problems. When you help update the ledger, you get a small percentage of the money spent.

>>17895 >super passionate Cool, you mind answering a retard's question? Could blockchain be used to host something like a private server amongst friends? Think of a discord server for a group or a game server, like maybe 100 people or so, for the purpose of the question, invite only. Instead of everything being hosted on a server, could it be hosted on a small chain? Rather than having someone host, you just send your friends a link, through that they join the chain. Once on chain, and as long as they're online, they're helping to host. Get a few guys together and you no longer have a single point of failure. I mean, if cryptominers can run mostly undetectable on people's computers (the ones that sneak in with sketchy downloads, etc) couldn't a small blockchain run on very low-impact nodes? I guess it might work better as essentially proof of stake, but the "stake" would just be an assigned role as a trusted user on that server. I'm imagining a chat program where each server is deployed as its own chain. Is this already done with other tech? Am I just dumb as fuck and this is either not feasible or doesn't solve anything? I feel like I explained this like shit. lol

>>20184 Crypto will go mainstream when visa and MasterCard support on the fly currency conversion, while handling all the shitty technical quirks of Bitcoin. (Like your wallet ID changing after every transaction)

>>21947 > your wallet ID changing after every transaction this is important for privacy, and there's ways to deal with that if you want a public address for donations for instance