What Is a Blockchain, Actually?

As we are seemingly entering another crypto bear-market, it is a good time to remind ourselves of a few patterns:

• 
  Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. Bear markets are times of consolidation and capitulation of weaker players, both as investors and projects. Those with strong conviction and mission stay, while the does who don't leave.


• The noise fades away: Bear markets are the best time to enter and learn about the Web3 space.


• 
  DeFi, the only proven use-case of Web3 is being ever more ingested by traditional finance. Web3, beyond is proven use-case of store of value and DeFi, is ever more at a crossroad of either being declared as "dead". This bear market will likely be the last opportunity for innovators to find out what this technology can do beyond the above two use-cases, or else I doubt if the valuations will continue to remain as high.

Interestingly, this dilemma was posed by Vitalik around the same time that I wrote the above. Hear this quote:

Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient.


It was created to set people free — to empower anyone, anywhere to coordinate without permission and without trusting anyone they cannot hold accountable.

Full manifesto here, original tweet on X.

All of this is in part is why I have written a concise, online and free book that tries to answer:

• What is actually the essence and building-blocks of the technology that has so far been created by Bitcoin, Ethereum and all of the other blockchains?


• What properties this technologies have, and consequently what use-cases can be improved or implemented using it?


• How this technology fits in the bigger picture of the original Web3 mission, and how far have we come so far


• .. And a few other bits of more technical explanation, like how blockchain scaling, Polkadot (the original project that led me to learn all of the above) and more.

Give it a read, and I hope it can give you a new perspective on what blockchains are actually about, as the name suggests