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Topic: What's the best way to explain super non technical person what's blockchain? (Read 244 times)

member
Activity: 123
Merit: 10
I'm sure many of you got to a situation that you try to explain people about the market but they are getting lost The mining aspect of bitcoin is like a cross between gold and this form of rock currency which was carved into a doughnut shape with a hole in the middle to represent work.hope to get good answers from you Maybe it would make better sense if it was described as a chain, like a physical steel chain with data contained inside each link that is verified by miners with new links in the chain being produced when new transactions are initiated.
legendary
Activity: 1148
Merit: 1048
Chipmixer rolling deep in the thread again I see  Cool

there is an anology about glass safety deposit boxes that kinda works, but more explains the semi anon nature of bitcoin than the blockchain, which to me is the whole of this. Charlie Shrem, the dude that used to run that service I talked about a few posts ago, had this explanation of bitcoin right before he went to prison (he is out now). Basically, he got accused of what the btce admin guy was accused of (facilitating large scale money laundering, and he just got out of jail kinda recently). Anywho, try this:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x3pdw/bitcoin-for-prison

Quote
The answer is yes. All you really need for a Bitcoin-like currency to work is the ability to keep track of transactions in a central ledger, which is double-checked frequently by users.

Without a computer or cell phone, prisoners would need to run a ledger completely offline from behind the prison walls. In other words, we'd need a physical notebook to keep track of all the transactions. Instead of swapping physical cans of mackerel, we'd simply write down the amounts in the notebook.

Let's call our prison-version of Bitcoin Mackerelcoin, or MAK.

Say I'm working out in the gym, and Dave needs to pay John 25 MAK for his monthly workout training. Instead of having to fill his pockets with 25 tins of fish, he'd simply ask me to move the funds from his account to John's. I'd open the ledger and write down "Dave paid John 25 MAK," and the date. Then I'd subtract 25 MAK from Dave's balance and add 25 MAK to John's.

(This isn't quite the same as Bitcoin, because as the single node, I'm acting similar to a banker. If we really wanted to imitate Bitcoin perfectly, many inmates throughout the prison would be keeping track of these transactions and then synchronizing them together, just like nodes in the Bitcoin network. When Dave paid John 25 MAK for a workout, every inmate in the yard would take out their notebook and jot down the transaction. Later, when John pays Tim 2 MAK for a haircut, all the other inmates in the salon would take out their notebooks and each record the transaction. Then at the end of the day, all the inmates would meet together and enter all the transactions into the main ledger. It's sort of like the Island of Yap, where the residents used enormous stone coins that were too heavy to move—when money changed hands, everyone in the village simply spread the word of its new owner.)

So remember, bitcoin is cans of mackerel in a prison yard with a notebook. Clear as water.
full member
Activity: 266
Merit: 100
What's the best way to explain super non technical person what's blockchain?
if you have methaphors or any idea of to make it simple it will be great.
I'm sure many of you got to a situation that you try to explain people about the market but they are getting lost Smiley
hope to get good answers from you

 Tnx and may Satoshi Nakamoto be with you


That can be a one hell of a job to do man.
I think it is better not to talk about that more when you are still trying to introduce bitcoin to someone. Because, this will flood up the mind of the person with overloading information. To be honest, I haven't had interests in learning the block-chain technology behind bitcoins back then when i was just starting. I only had interests for the matter after a month of being in the crypto world.

So i think it's better to not talk about that unless the person asks about it when he hears it. Because it will surely confuse anyone not into those kind of things.
legendary
Activity: 2478
Merit: 1360
Don't let others control your BTC -> self custody
Does that person have a bank account? You could always say that transactions are visible on the blockchain as they are being sent and received, just like they are in the logs of a bank when the institution moves your money around. The difference is that to get the whole database you'd have to get a court subpoena, while on blockchain it's all free and accessible.

legendary
Activity: 2562
Merit: 1441
Bittorrent with its distributed networking architecture could be a passable comparison in terms of how nodes/miners and the networking aspect of crypto functions. Crypto nodes are run on a volunteer basis similar to how bittorrent seeds are run and the hardware resources they devote to the system are shared over transactions similar to the relationship between seeds and downloaders on bittorrent.

The mining aspect of bitcoin is like a cross between gold and this form of rock currency which was carved into a doughnut shape with a hole in the middle to represent work.



Instead of laborious effort needed to carve rocks into shapes, bitcoin miners express this effort in terms of a high number of cryptographic calculations with the supply of bitcoin being limited cryptographically to prevent "overprinting" of currency/devaluation. This is where all those GPU's and ASICs come into play hammering out high volumes of floating point operations (FLOPs). The cryptographic portion of things also provides security in terms of raising the bar of how much cryptographic power would be required to falsify transactions.

Blockchain is a ledger based system which merges these two technologies, distributed networking with a miner based cryptographic system. Past that its difficult to explain without someone knowing what programming algorithms/data structures are.

Maybe it would make better sense if it was described as a chain, like a physical steel chain with data contained inside each link that is verified by miners with new links in the chain being produced when new transactions are initiated.
newbie
Activity: 44
Merit: 0
What's the best way to explain super non technical person what's blockchain?
if you have methaphors or any idea of to make it simple it will be great.
I'm sure many of you got to a situation that you try to explain people about the market but they are getting lost Smiley
hope to get good answers from you

 Tnx and may Satoshi Nakamoto be with you
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