The growing popularity of cryptocurrencies has aroused mainstream interest in blockchain technologies and their possibilities. Increasingly, blockchain is used as a generic term that most people associate with Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency created using the technology. The potential and scope of the application of decentralized protocols have already become so much broader.
The Bitcoin blockchain is a global distributed ledger consisting of data blocks sequentially linked in a chain. Each block contains information about the preceding block. The data of blocks is copied and stored on different Bitcoin mining nodes without being bound to one specific server, making the substitution of records impossible.
A permanently locked set of rules or “Protocols” governs the flow of data through the distributed network of nodes.
