How is blockchain as a technology different from the crypto world?

You’ve probably have herd countless times hearing about blockchain technology and all the ways it is changing the world. And at some point, you may have asked this, “Hey… what the heck even?is?a blockchain?” The best probable answer with reference you could have received is "Bitcoin - Cryptocurrency".

For the majority, cryptocurrency and blockchain means the same thing. But as someone working in blockchain solutions, I’ve found that many entities wanting to get into the genre believe these terms are synonymous. To make matters worse, promoting efforts often play fast and void with the terms, creating even more confusion for people who aren’t aware of the industry’s language.

Here’s an easy way to think about the difference:

Imagine you’re in a play-zone of a mall. You enter the premises and exchange your cash for chips. You can use these chips to play at the gaming zone, but outside the building, they have no legitimate purchasing power. In this example, cryptocurrency happens to be the gaming chips, and the blockchain network is the play-zone of mall. This blockchain network provides an ecosystem of participants and cryptocurrencies allowing them to be transacted while playing around.

I’ve read so many articles trying to explain what is a blockchain. Can you make me understand in more simplified way?

You can think of an obsessive cricket club like a blockchain, filled with members who love to keep record of matches. The club has a ton of complicated rules to make sure that every member writes down the exact same set of records about all the cricket matches played each time and match's vitals as well and that once data is recorded and accepted, it becomes exponentially more difficult to change as more and more records are added on top of it. Then, usually, outsiders can come and check out all their records and go, “Oh, wow, MS Dhoni scored double century on his retirement match. Cool.”

So what’s the point?

At their soul, blockchains allows you to trust strangers with data on the internet. If anyone wants to share information, that no one can change, public blockchain is the way and this isn’t controlled by any single person or entity. Instead of any entity keeping track of everything, that work-load/responsibility is shared out to everyone on the network. The following properties may sound geeky in language like “distributed ledger,” “peer-to-peer,” and “cryptographically hashed,” but these are the few simple things that those words describe.

Blocks?

Blocks are where data is stored on blockchain. Whosoever creates/makes the blockchain, it's upto them to decide what kind of data they want to be stored. I could, if i wanted to, crate a blockchain where each block saves the entire record of "50 Shades of Grey".

For cryptocurrencies though, records of valid transactions that took place in network is stored. You can imagine these blocks in cryptocurrencies as boxes of receipts.

Chain?

Let's say i just made a new blockchain: the genesis block which is the first block would be there, but all alone. Then, the second block would come along to join first block, and this cycles continues creating a chain (of blocks).

Okay, Blockchain systems are very complicated and to understand it, why don't you take our introductory course for it?

So are we just talking about cryptocurrencies here?

Well, maybe or maybe not. Cryptocurrencies are built using blockchain technology and till today they are the well-known usage of blockchain technology. Cryptocurrencies are the first known application built upon the blockchain and because of this people think that they are interchangeable - as in blockchain and cryptocurrencies are same.

So what is Blockchain?

Blockchain is just a technology which creates an eco-system of zero-trust. This means there ain't any third-party intermediate required to create trust. Since cryptocurrencies are excellent working applications of blockchain technology, we can use it multiple scenarios where records are being maintained like supply-chain, banking, IoT data and so on.?