{"id":803,"date":"2018-02-15T11:02:29","date_gmt":"2018-02-15T11:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/answerwall.domain.bc.edu\/?p=803"},"modified":"2018-02-15T19:15:10","modified_gmt":"2018-02-15T19:15:10","slug":"what-is-blockchain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/2018\/02\/15\/what-is-blockchain\/","title":{"rendered":"What is blockchain?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"What<\/a>
What is blockchain?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Blockchain is hard to explain via post-it. Let’s say I spend money from my bank account in January and make a document with all of my transactions: how much they were, who I paid, etc. I can continue to add to that ledger throughout my lifetime, but it eventually gets to be such a big file that I can’t move it anywhere. In order to make it smaller, I can take chunks of a ledger (say January only) and create hashes (unique IDs based on the contents of the file). Then I can add the hash of all of the January transactions to my February ledger and I now know where to look for January’s if I want to go back that far. The same is true for March, I can add the hash of February, which also contains the hash of January’s transactions. This is where the “chain” part comes in, you’re creating a chain of pointers back to blocks of information all the way back to the beginning. A (better) simple explanation can be found here: bit.ly\/blockchainsimple<\/a>. Princeton has a great and VERY detailed video series on blockchain here: bit.ly\/princetonblockchain<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blockchain is hard to explain via post-it. Let’s say I spend money from my bank account in January and make a document with all of my transactions: how much they were, who I paid, etc. I can continue to add to that ledger throughout my lifetime, but it eventually gets to be such a big … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What is blockchain?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-tech","tag-blockchain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826,"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions\/826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.bc.edu\/answerwall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}