What is Blockchain?

The blockchain initially designates Bitcoin’s data structure to list all the transactions carried out by its users since its inception: the transactions are grouped into blocks chained together. This register is shared between the members of a network; hence we sometimes speak of a distributed record.

Since 2015, blockchain has also referred to the decentralized consensus technology brought up to date by Bitcoin. Therefore, this technology designates all the methods, allowing the distributed network participants to agree without resorting to a trusted third party. In this article, I will explain briefly what is a blockchain.

Where does blockchain come from?

As we know it today, the concept of blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto and described in the Bitcoin white paper on October 31, 2008. However, Satoshi Nakamoto did not coin the term, and we owed that to Hal Finney, who first used it in his response to Satoshi on November 7, 2008, to refer to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work chain. He then named it “block chain” in two words. Satoshi picked up the term in the source code for Bitcoin version 0.1, and it gradually became popular within the community.

However, the technology behind the blockchain was not entirely created with Bitcoin. The elements that compose it are much older than we think: the blockchain is the fruit of many years of research in economics, computer science, and cryptography.

The blockchain promotes ​​decentralization, which, unsurprisingly, is opposed to centralization. Today we live in a world where most of the financial and economical dynamics are centralized. States, banks, corporations are what we called trusted third parties, and the blockchain aims to operate without them.

Bitcoin, which uses blockchain technology, eliminates the need for a trusted third party to transmit value between two entities. This is the first concrete application of this technology. Thanks to Bitcoin and the blockchain, transferring an amount over the internet between two entities without an intermediary is now possible.