web3/concepts/blockchain.md

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Blockchain

A blockchain is the technical underpinnings for crypto assets such as bitcoin and ethereum.

In computer science terms, a blockchain is a data structure that maintains a list of transactions that are authenticated using public key cryptography and linked using a hash function. A blockchain is a partial ordering of transaction event into windows of discrete time by which the transactions are programmatically committed to a shared history which is synchronized via a consensus algorithm.

The term has been overloaded extensively and other data structures and topologies have been described as blockchain regardless of their use. See permissioned-blockchain.