Blockchains

What is a Blockchain?

A blockchain can be simply defined as containing the following items:

• A collection of previous blocks that each contain hashes of previous transactions
• A hash of the previous block
• A new/current block that contains hashes of transactions
• A hash of the current block of transactions

What is a Hash?

A digital fingerprint or one-way function that takes some data as input e.g. a transaction, a digital book, etc and creates a string of characters that represents the hashed data. The hash is used to ensure the data has not been changed and ensures it's integrity.