Crypto-what?
If you've attempted to dive into this mysterious thing called blockchain, you would be forgiven for recoiling in horror at the sheer opaqueness of the technical jargon that's often used to frame it. So before we enter what a crytpocurrency is and how blockchain technology might change the world, let's discuss what blockchain actually is.

In the simplest terms, a blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions, not unlike the ledgers we've been using since way back when to record sales and purchases. The event of this digital ledger is, actually, pretty much identical to a normal ledger for the reason that it records debits and credits between people. That is the core concept behind blockchain; the difference is who holds the ledger and who verifies the transactions.

With traditional transactions, a payment from one person to another involves some kind of intermediary to facilitate the transaction. Let's say Rob wants to transfer �20 to Melanie. He can either give her cash in the proper execution of a �20 note, or he can use some kind of banking app to transfer the money directly to her bank account. In both cases, a bank is the intermediary verifying the transaction: Rob's funds are verified when he takes the money out of a cash machine, or they're verified by the app when he makes the digital transfer. Best Ethereum Wallets decides if the transaction is going ahead. The lender also holds the record of all transactions made by Rob, and is solely responsible for updating it whenever Rob pays someone or receives money into his account. Basically, the bank holds and controls the ledger, and everything flows through the lender.

That's a lot of responsibility, so it is important that Rob feels he can trust his bank otherwise he would not risk his money with them. He must feel confident that the bank will not defraud him, won't lose his money, will not be robbed, and will not disappear overnight. This need for trust has underpinned pretty much every major behaviour and element of the monolithic finance industry, to the extent that even when it was discovered that banks were being irresponsible with our money during the financial meltdown of 2008, the government (another intermediary) chose to bail them out instead of risk destroying the final fragments of trust by letting them collapse.

Blockchains operate differently in a single key respect: they are entirely decentralised. There is no central clearing house such as a bank, and there is no central ledger held by one entity. Instead, the ledger is distributed across a massive network of computers, called nodes, all of which holds a copy of the complete ledger on their respective hard drives. These nodes are linked to one another via a piece of software called a peer-to-peer (P2P) client, which synchronises data across the network of nodes and makes certain that everybody gets the same version of the ledger at any given time