You’re here, you’re reading this, you’ve heard about Sweetbridge. Great!But wait a minute, what even is a blockchain?!Google says;This isn’t entirely correct. You have private, permissioned blockchains as well as public and you don’t have to have a cryptocurrency to use a blockchain.So let’s rewind and go back to the start…Many years ago people traded and bartered for goods…Wait, too far back!A very long time ago when you wanted to store some money you would walk into a bank with your cash / asset you wanted to be looked after and they would write down how much cash / what the asset was and your name on a ledger. The value in that ledger showed the value of the bank and that worked great. Unless someone fudged the numbers.Back around 2008 lots of bankers were doing just that, fudging the numbers in subprime mortgages and glossing them up as something that they were not. The markets crashed out and people lost faith in the banks. It’s no coincidence that in this recession and time period Bitcoin really came into the market.With Bitcoin now entering the mainstream, it has, in my opinion, acted as an inadvertent advertisement for blockchain technology. People were intrigued by this untraceable, highly secure, store of value that people were using to transact with each globally on a level playing field — and with no banks! But what lay below?Bitcoin, and other blockchains, are made from a continuous series of “blocks” records which are all bolted together using cryptography (complex problems made to hide information). Each of these blocks also contains a cryptographic hash (Bitcoin uses SHA-256 hashing, BTW) of the previous block, so by design it is very secure as if you change one block then all of the other blocks won’t work.This works well. The Bitcoin network itself has never been hacked. I repeat, the Bitcoin network has NEVER BEEN HACKED! How many banks can say that?Hash functions are only ever one directional. The same input will generate the same output, but if you put that output back through the hash function then you will just get a hash of the hash, which is of no use to anyone. As you can see in the above simplified Blockchain image, the information and transactions from each block get hashed and then form part of the new block. New transactions that have occurred within that block enter the blockchain through what is called a Merkle Root, also commonly referred to as Hash Trees, which allow you to add data to the blockchain without ever showing what that data is. Magic!The result of not being able to change information within a blockchain means all of the records are permanent. If you make a mistake, it’s on the blockchain and you have to show your correction on the blockchain.Decentralisation is another word that is thrown around very often when talking about blockchains and Bitcoin, probably because they are often distributed networks…Public, permissionless blockchains are, by design, decentralised. This means that the network is supported by “miners” / “nodes” that are distributed around the world. They support the blockchain by verifying transactions using complex mathematical processes. With this being decentralised, there is no one central trusted party verifying transactions and transactions have to be verified by multiple sources to gain consensus that you have the funds to send.This also means that the public networks are completely borderless as they are not governed by a central bank or government. 1 BTC is worth 1 BTC all around the world.This is where blockchain technology really comes into its own. You have an immutable, public record of all of the transactions from all time, and that can’t be changed. Throw in IoT, AI and Machine Learning and you have a very exciting time lying ahead. Imagine if you could track the temperature of your food shipment in a way that couldn’t be altered?At Sweetbridge we are using blockchain as it allows you to unleash value in assets you already own, as well as being able to create independent financial entities that can work with one another on a truly global scale.Blockchain 101 was originally published in Sweetbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.