Perhaps BITCOIN’s greatest gift to the web is not the disruptive nature of a digital currency, but the platform used to build that distributed, worldwide, decentralized crypto-currency. BITCOIN’s platform, often referred to as a blockchain, uses an innovative approach to keep transactions secure, validate ownership and guarantee provenance.
A blockchain consists of a distributed cryptographic ledger shared amongst all nodes participating in the network, where every successfully performed transaction is recorded and shared. In other words, blockchains are proving to be a fully auditable, incorruptible database that can deny any known hack or attack.
Although the importance of the blockchain is often lost amongst the discussion of digital currency, blockchains have the potential to disrupt how the internet itself works. Simply put, there is a lot more to blockchains than just crypto-currency and monetary applications. Truth be told, a blockchain is a decentralized ledger protocol (and/or platform) that can govern both financial and non-financial types of application states.
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