Introduction to blockchain

There are various definitions of blockchain; it depends on how you look at it. If you look at it from a business perspective it can be defined in that context, if you look at it from a technical perspective one can define it in view of that.

Blockchain at its core is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger that is cryptographically secure, append-only, immutable (extremely hard to change), and updateable only via consensus or agreement among peers.

Blockchain can be thought of as a layer of a distributed peer-to-peer network running on top of the Internet, as can be seen below in the diagram. It is analogous to SMTP, HTTP, or FTP running on top of TCP/IP. This is shown in the following diagram:

The network view of a blockchain ...

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