Blockchain
A distributed ledger made of cryptographically linked blocks that record transactions under shared consensus rules.
A blockchain is a ledger maintained by many nodes that agree on an ordered history of valid blocks. Each block commits to the previous block, making past changes visible and increasingly expensive to rewrite.
Blockchains use consensus rules to decide which transactions and blocks are valid. Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, and permissioned consensus systems use different methods to choose the next block and resolve conflicts.
Public blockchains are commonly used for peer-to-peer money, tokens, smart contracts, settlement, and auditable records. Their tradeoffs include scalability limits, user-experience challenges, regulatory uncertainty, and the need for secure key management.
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