What was the last time you bought a brand-name item, like a luxury watch, or maybe a pair of sunglasses? How can you tell that that watch or those glasses was actually genuine and not a counterfeit knockoff? Or how about, let’s assume that you wanna make an investment in a multi-million dollar painting or a work of art of some sort. How can you tell that that painting or that work of art was actually made by the real artist and that it’s not just a knockoff or that it wasn’t stolen?
Being able to have accurate information about the provenance and the history of an asset when you’re dealing in transactions of value is essential, but in a world full of hackers and malware, and counterfeit goods, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to prove the authenticity and the provenance of those assets. There’s an answer, and it’s blockchain because blockchain could provide a single source of truth that’s permanent, verifiable, and unchangeable.
My objective is to make this as simple and as clear as possible because there are a lot of people that assume that blockchain is extremely complicated but when you narrow it down it’s actually quite a simple process.
Let’s look now at a definition of a blockchain. A blockchain is a constantly growing ledger, that keeps a permanent record of all the transactions that have taken place in a secure, chronological, and immutable way.
In a nutshell, a blockchain is a ledger, that’s all it really is. It’s a ledger, it’s actually a file that keeps a record of all the transactions that have taken place.