Blockchain Basics
7 guides and tools on blockchain basics.
How the underlying technology works — blocks, hashes, keys, consensus and the trade-offs that come with removing a central authority.
What Is a Blockchain? A Plain-English Explanation
Strip away the terminology and a blockchain is a ledger kept by thousands of computers at once, where changing an old entry would mean …
Blockchain BasicsHow Bitcoin Actually Works, Step by Step
The best way to understand Bitcoin is to follow one payment through the system and watch what each part of the machinery does to it.…
Blockchain BasicsPublic and Private Keys Explained
Every warning about crypto security traces back to one asymmetry: deriving a public key from a private key is trivial, and reversing it…
Blockchain BasicsWhat Is Ethereum?
Bitcoin is a ledger for one asset. Ethereum is a ledger that can run arbitrary programs, which is a much larger and much messier idea.…
Blockchain BasicsGas Fees Explained, and How to Pay Less
A gas fee is not a payment to a company. It is an auction for space in a block, and understanding the auction is how you stop overpayin…
Blockchain BasicsSmart Contracts Explained
A smart contract is neither smart nor a contract. It is a program that runs exactly as written, which is a much narrower and more dange…
Blockchain BasicsBitcoin vs Ethereum: An Honest Comparison
They are not competitors in the way the framing suggests. They optimise for different properties, and the trade-offs are deliberate on …
About this section
Almost every confusion about cryptocurrency dissolves once the underlying mechanism is clear, and the mechanism is simpler than the vocabulary around it suggests. A blockchain is a ledger held identically by many independent computers, where each entry contains a cryptographic fingerprint of the entry before it. That structure is what makes history tamper-evident: altering an old record invalidates everything after it.
Everything else — mining, staking, consensus rules, gas, keys — exists to make that arrangement work when some participants are offline, unreliable or actively dishonest. Understanding what each piece is for is more useful than memorising what it is called.
The guides in this section build that picture in order. They cover what a blockchain does and what it costs you to remove the central authority; how a single Bitcoin transaction travels from your wallet to final settlement; what a private key actually is and why losing one is irreversible; how Ethereum extends the model to run arbitrary programs, and what that adds in both capability and risk.
We state the trade-offs alongside the capabilities throughout. A blockchain is slower, more expensive per transaction and far less reversible than an ordinary database. Those costs buy a specific property — not needing to trust an operator — and that property is worth the price in a narrower set of cases than the technology's promoters claim.