Bitcoin is a network that runs on a protocol known as the blockchain. A 2008 paper by a person or people calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto first described both the blockchain and bitcoin, and for a while the two terms were all but synonymous. The blockchain has since been conceptually divorced from its first application, and thousands of blockchains have been created using similar cryptographic techniques. This history can make the nomenclature confusing. "Blockchain" sometimes refers to the original, bitcoin blockchain; other times it refers to blockchain technology in general, or to any other specific blockchain, such as the one that powers Ethereum.
The basics of blockchain technology are mercifully straightforward. Any given blockchain consists of a single chain of discrete blocks of information, arranged chronologically. In principle this information can be any string of 1s and 0s – emails, contracts, land titles, marriage certificates, bond trades – and this versatility has caught the eye of governments and private corporations. In bitcoin's case, though, the information is mostly transactions.
Bitcoin is really just a list. Person A sent X bitcoin to person B, who sent Y bitcoin to person C, etc. By tallying these transactions up, everyone knows where individual users stand. Another name for a blockchain is a "distributed ledger," which emphasizes the key difference between this technology and a well-kept Word doc. Bitcoin's blockchain is public. Anyone can download it in its entirety or head to any number of sites that parse it. You can see, for example, that 15N3yGu3UFHeyUNdzQ5sS3aRFRzu5Ae7EZ sent 0.01718427 bitcoin to 1JHG2qjdk5Khiq7X5xQrr1wfigepJEK3t on August 14, 2017, between 11:10 and 11:20 a.m. If you were law enforcement or otherwise very sophisticated, you could probably figure out who controlled these addresses (the long strings of numbers and letters). Bitcoin's network is not totally anonymous, in other words, though taking certain precautions can make it very hard to link individuals to transactions.
Read more: How Bitcoin Works | Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-bitcoin-works/#ixzz586JJ5q33
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