The first force – blockchain

Finally, we got to the point where we can give a straight answer to the question, which everyone has been asking and which is central to this book—what is blockchain?

Blockchain is a decentralized database, which is distributed over a computer network, with each computer in that network storing an identical copy of the same database filesystem. In the context of financial transactions, this is also referred to as DLT because a ledger is an accounting book or a collection of financial records.

In finance, we use a ledger to record all accounting related to a specific entity. A company's bank account would have a ledger that contains many, many transactions. Every time money comes in, or goes out, a new entry would have to be registered in the ledger. In the same way, a blockchain distributed ledger keeps the same information related to a series of transactions across multiple computers, forming a peer-to-peer network.