The blockchain attacks some old intermediaries: central counterparty clearinghouses, notaries, escrow services, and any services with a built-in trust component. While the blockchain chips away at some functions from these existing intermediaries, it also enables the creation of new players.

The blockchain decentralizes trust and makes way to multiple, singularly harmless, but collectively powerful entities that authenticate it.

For analogy, imagine a door that needs two keys to open it. In this case, the public key is used by the sender to encrypt information that can only be decrypted by the owner of the private key. You never reveal your private key. A digital signature is a mathematical computation that is used to prove the authenticity of a (digital) message or

By 2015, more than $19 billion in venture funding had been poured into FinTech startups.2 Many of them were focused on just a few popular areas: loans, wealth management, and payments.

1. Smart contracts are not the same as a contractual agreement. If we stick to Nick Szabo’s original idea, smart contracts help make the breach of an agreement expensive because they control a real-world valuable property via “digital means.” So, a smart contract can enforce a functional implementation of a particular requirement, and can show proof

Today, we google for everything, mostly information or products. Tomorrow, we will perform the equivalent of “googling” to verify records, identities, authenticity, rights, work done, titles, contracts, and other valuable asset-related processes. There will be digital ownership certificates for everything.

So, the blockchain is like a networked infrastructure of computing machinery. With that in mind, we could easily imagine how computer programs can run on this new infrastructure.

Currently, all existing blockchain protocols have the property that every computer in the network must process every transaction—a property that provides extreme degrees of fault tolerance and security, but at the cost of ensuring that the network's processing power is effectively bounded by the processing power of a single node.

cryptography (via hash codes) is used to secure the authentication of the transaction source and removes the need for a central intermediary.