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 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 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?