Now for the moment, let's postpone

Now for the moment, let's postpone the how of this, and just focus on what could you do If that was true, what could you do if we could have a shared, incorruptible, secure, and authoritative ledger, where the ledger becomes the source of truth, and that because it includes history, it can be the authoritative record of proof that, yes, you actually do own the asset that you say you own, and that, yes, I have the asset I say I have. When we could decide on a transaction that exchanges one for the other, we could both could immediately have an identical copy of the transaction in that ledger, and it couldn't be changed. Well then, we wouldn't need a middleman, everything becomes cheaper and quicker. If there's no inherent costs to a transaction, we could make more transactions, whether small, or large, or whatever. And this magical ledger doesn't just have to be between 2 people, we could make it between 3, or 10, or 1000. We could make it completely public. And the thing is we don't have to trust each individual party, we don't have to like them or even know them, as long as we can all trust the ledger as that source of truth. And this is what Blockchain does. And you'll hear the term distributed ledger or shared ledger. The entire point of this technology is to create a distributed digital ledger, a shared network of information that is duplicated across many different computers. And when any person in this adds a new entry, a new transaction to this ledger, it is automatically copied across all the different participants, what we call the different nodes in the system. Now with the Blockchain that's used for Bitcoin, for example, and has all the transactions for that currency, there are actually tens of thousands of different nodes, different computers that have a copy of the same data, and what makes Blockchain very different from a conventional database is that this distributed ledger isn't owned by just one person or organization, there is no single administrator, nobody is in charge because the data isn't only on one specific computer in one server room in one company, it is decentralized. So any changes to it aren't done in one master location and then blasted out to all the subordinate locations, no, there is no master, there is no subordinates, everyone is a peer. And new transactions can be added at any point in this network, and they will be automatically copied peer to peer. Now there are some applications of Blockchain that don't need to be public, and where we might even want some extra layer of control, we'll get to that a little later, but it's this ability of Blockchain to act as a single shared source of truth. It works incredibly well for financial transaction, but can also make it useful for so much more. But first, let's get a little bit deeper into how Blockchain can actually do this.