The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. – Don & Alex Tapscott, authors Blockchain Revolution (2016)

The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. It was implemented the following year by Nakamoto as a core component of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions on the network.

Blocks

Blocks hold batches of valid transactions that are hashed and encoded into a Merkle tree.^[1] Each block includes the cryptographic hash of the prior block in the blockchain, linking the two. The linked blocks form a chain.^[1] This iterative process confirms the integrity of the previous block, all the way back to the original genesis bloc