Blockchain... What are you talking about?

We continue in our blog with the section: What are you talking about? It is a small contribution to this blog dedicated to Culture and in which we want to collect all those terms or expressions, whether or not they are included in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), but which for one reason or another, now or in recent years are "sounding" in the media, in the street, in our environment.

Today we bring you a word that has been in our lives for some time now, but which we still struggle to understand: BLOCKCHAIN. Don and Alex Tapscott in their book Blockchain Revolution define this term: as a technology comparable to "an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not only financial transactions, but virtually everything of value".

BLOCKCHAIN: The blockchain is a technology that was designed with the world of cryptocurrencies and, specifically, bitcoin in mind. It is a large database that is distributed among various participants, nodes, in the network. A logbook that records all the transactions carried out there.

It is used to store data and processes in an unbreakable way. Its nature means that any data or process can be stored with full guarantees that it cannot be modified by anyone. It is a "distributed" database in numerous nodes, where each piece of data is encrypted and related to the previous one.

This technology fulfils the function of recording, preserving and protecting the information of any kind of digital operation, without third party intervention. It works as a shared and continuously updated database. It is used in sectors as diverse as banking, healthcare, logistics, administration... even the Spanish LaLiga has adopted this technology for some of its actions.