What is blockchain? First, imagine a spreadsheet that’s reproduced thousands of times across a network of computers. Then imagine that this network is designed to regularly update this spreadsheet and its shared and continually reconciled database.  

Now you have pretty good idea of how blockchain works –but also why blockchain constitutes a revolution on how information is shared and secured on the ‘net.

Since the blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location, it means its records are easily verifiable. No centralized version of this information exists for a hacker to corrupt—and since the data is hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, it’s accessible to anyone on the internet. But it’s also protected because after every transaction within the shared ledger; and once all the ledgers match for every computer in the network; the transaction is encrypted with the rest in what’s known as a block.  The new block is then added to existing previous blocks to form a chain of blocks—hence blockchain.

Now, it’s true that blockchain gets a bad press because of its association with Bitcoin, which finds itself under financial and political siege. Cryptocurrencies like blockchain because it allows all parties to track, verify and agree upon transactions, even when the individual participants remain anonymous. But that’s just one of the uses of blockchain. Besides Blockchain itself a growing number of companies like Ethereum and Blockstack offer the same decentralized architecture to protect and authenticate all kinds of data. Microsoft, Walmart and JPMorgan are already starting to deploy their own private blockchain networks in which only partners, suppliers or customers allowed to participate while delivering thousands of transactions per second.