Understanding blockchains

Before diving instantly into the technical part, which will be covered in Chapter 2, A Technical Dive into Blockchain, you should first have an overview of what a blockchain is. If you have already read or heard about the topic, you might have figured out that it is appropriate for any use case relying on trust being ensured by a third party and where value is exchanged between different stakeholders. With the help of a simple example taken from an imaginary situation, the following sections will hopefully unravel the things you might have been confused about and the things you are eager to understand.

Using centralized ledger systems

Imagine a village of 20 people living on an island in...