Still Perplexed by Blockchain? Read This Story That I Told To My 10 yr Old

These days blockchain is everywhere. You turn on the news, you hear bitcoin, you open up Medium you see blockchain, you browse the web you see cryptocurrency there too. It’s everywhere!

People have mostly heard about Bitcoin and that it’s built on blockchain technology. But, what is blockchain exactly?

Let’s get down to the basics

We all know that children are naturally curious and inquisitive, and sometimes their questions surprise you. It happened to me recently, when I was talking to my cousin’s son, who is 10 years old, last night. He asked me, “Brother, What is blockchain?”

Stumped, right?

I parroted what I have heard from all around me almost instinctively that the blockchain was “a decentralized, distributed ledger of transactions.” Obviously, this would not make any sense to him. It was then that I realized that it probably means not a whole lot to many adults either.

So, how to describe blockchain in the simplest way?

Well, it was half-past 9, so I thought of explaining to him with a story.

The story

Once upon a time, a little magical hamlet was inhabited with tiny, wonderful individuals.

Cryptic, a young child who resided in this hamlet, had his birthday on 1st April. He got a wooden ink pen on his birthday and he started writing with it.

The peculiarity of this ink pen, like most things in the magical hamlet, was that this wooden ink pen wasn’t always a pen, nor was it in Cryptic’s ownership from the beginning. But still, there was a way to track the journey of Cryptic birthday’s present, from its beginning to its final destination in this enchanted hamlet.

As part of the village’s magical record-keeping, the residents kept a list of all the objects they exchanged with each other and sent to other villages. It was possible for anyone to access and edit this information at any time.

As a result, when Cryptic’s parents traded for the pen at the local market for a sack of onions, both they and the market vendor amended the record to reflect the transaction. But that’s not all. The records went back much further than this.

You see, the wooden ink pen was not always a wooden pen, it was a wooden stick before and even before the stick, it was just timber stock. And before that timber stock lay in a yard waiting to be modified, it was part of a tall and proud tree in the forest adjacent to the hamlet.

Any villager, Cryptic included, could find this information by just looking at the mysterious record. Indeed, it traced Cryptic’s pen from its days as a tree along with each stop on its way to becoming the wooden ink pen Cryptic now writes with.

The same was true for each and every product moving in and out of Cryptic’s hamlet.

And what a handy tool it was! It meant that nobody, but the entire town, had to keep track of these things. There were no brokers who charged the villages to keep track of their goods’ comings and goings.

The record was utilized by the community, as well as the other surrounding hamlets, to keep themselves informed of the operations of the entire local economy.

They then combined these records into one larger record, generating a start-to-finish list of all products transferred in the country.

Cryptic blissfully played with his pen, without worrying about where it came from or how it was made. But if he needed that information, he only had to consult the magical record, and it was all right there at his fingertips.

But after listening to my story my cousin seemed confused and asked me “But what’s a blockchain, bro?” he asked as if I was speaking in codes.

So I asked him how he thought the magical record worked in the hamlet. He replied that everyone kept it up to date.

Then I questioned him where the magical record was located, and he replied “with everyone”.

Finally, when I inquired what the magical record accomplished, he said, “It kept track of where things originated from and who handed them to whom.”

Isn’t it impressive for a 10-year-old?

For Grown-ups

The bottom line is that the following principles are included in the basic description of a blockchain ledger:

• It’s maintained by every user on the blockchain, which means there is no central authority or a place where the data is stored.
• It’s decentralized, meaning every user in the network of millions of computers has a complete copy.
• It can track the entire transaction history of any given item.

And that’s how I was able to keep my 10-year-old cousin’s attention and somewhat explain what blockchain means. Try doing the same for your cousin or children and you’ll find the concept of blockchain much easier to grasp.

As Joseph Joubert said ‘Teaching is learning twice”