The Dumbest Explanation of Blockchain Ever Written
The Dumbest Explanation of Blockchain Ever Written
Nonsensical yet appetizing.
Let’s say I go to the grocery store and buy 100 bags of frozen buffalo chicken tenders. Each bag contains about a dozen frozen buffalo chicken tenders, meaning I have 1,200 frozen buffalo chicken tenders.
I decide to give 100 frozen buffalo chicken tenders each to 11 of my friends—all of whom love frozen buffalo chicken tenders. Now me and my 11 friends all own 100 frozen buffalo chicken tenders.
100 frozen buffalo chicken tenders is a lot of frozen buffalo chicken tenders. How can we keep track of all of them? One option is to store them in our parents’ fridge, but then we’d be providing a third-party with access to our frozen buffalo chicken tenders. They could potentially lose our frozen buffalo chicken tenders or try and steal them from us.
Instead, we agree to keep track of each other’s frozen buffalo chicken tenders by buying a giant fridge and putting our frozen buffalo chicken tenders into buckets in the fridge with our names on them.
To ensure there’s no funny business, we each buy 1,200 frozen buffalo chicken tender fridge magnets. When someone takes a frozen buffalo chicken tender out of their bucket in the fridge, we all confirm the event by writing their name down on a frozen buffalo chicken tender magnet and sticking it on the fridge. This way, everyone has a record of who’s doing what in regards to their frozen buffalo chicken tenders. No individual person has to be relied upon.
So for instance, if I go to the fridge and take out 20 frozen buffalo chicken tenders, but the frozen buffalo chicken tender fridge magnet record shows I only have 15 frozen buffalo chicken tenders left in my bucket, everyone will know that I’m stealing frozen buffalo chicken tenders from someone else’s bucket, and stop me in my tracks.
Over time we continue to take frozen buffalo chicken tenders out of the fridge and sometimes even trade frozen buffalo chicken tenders with each other in exchange for favors—such as buying blue cheese sauce to eat with the frozen buffalo chicken tenders.
This leads to a new problem…we can only fit so many frozen buffalo chicken tender magnets on the fridge! With everyone putting up frozen buffalo chicken tender magnets every time a frozen buffalo chicken tender exits the fridge, space is going to fill up quickly.
So how do we maintain the record of the frozen buffalo chicken tenders if we’ve run out of frozen buffalo chicken tender magnet space? By buying a second fridge, moving our buckets of frozen buffalo chicken tenders to that fridge, and using its magnet space to continue the record, of course!
But before we do that, we need to make sure that nobody changes the magnet record on the first fridge. The only way to ensure that happens is by making it literally impossible for the fridge record to be altered. In other words, we need to launch the fridge into outer space. We all work individually to find a way to launch the fridge into outer space. As you might imagine, launching a fridge into outer space is very hard. It takes a considerable amount of time, energy, and money.
But to incentivize the work, the one who successfully launches the fridge into outer space earns one frozen buffalo chicken tender. And mind you, this frozen buffalo chicken tender does not come from the grocery store. It’s literally produced out of thin air!
Once someone launches the fridge into outer space, we all make a record of the event by placing a magnet on the new fridge.
With the old fridge in orbit, its magnet record is immutable (yes, magnets do work in outer space). Now, if we need to refer to the historical record in regards to any activity involving the frozen buffalo chicken tenders, all we must do is pull out our telescope, spot the fridge, and review the magnet record. Nobody can dispute the record and nobody can change it without a considerable amount of effort. Therefore, everyone can trust it, and we can govern ourselves instead of worrying our parents will eat our frozen buffalo chicken tenders.
And so it goes that we continue to buy fridges, fill our buckets with frozen buffalo chicken tenders, make magnet records on the fridge regarding events pertaining to our frozen buffalo chicken tenders, and launch the fridges into outer space when we can no longer fit any more magnets upon them. Make sense?
Now imagine the frozen buffalo chicken tenders are cryptocurrency, the buckets we put the chicken tenders in are digital wallets, our parents are the bank, the individual magnets are one record of a transaction, the fridge is a “block” of transactions, the process of launching the fridge into space is “mining,” the reward for launching the fridge into space is one cryptocurrency, and the record of launching each fridge into outer space is the “chain” that connects the “blocks” that are the fridges.
In other words, all the fridges floating in space together are the blockchain! Get it?
Q&A on the article
Q: Do YOU get it?
A: Lol no. But I did find this article helpful.
Q: Nobody cares dude, we’ve all moved on to AI.
A: That’s cool if you prefer tech with proven use cases.
This is not the dumbest explanation of blockchain. The dumbest one is this: a class of students takes a quiz. Instead of the teacher grading it, which would mean the teacher's pet getting lenient treatment, they all pass the quiz to the student on their left to grade. The problem is, no one can figure out the last answer on the quiz, so they're all flipping through the textbook at random to find the answer. They keep passing the quizzes around and eventually, one lucky student flips to the right page, finds the answer, and can grade the quiz on their desk, which go up on the wall at the back of the class for everyone to see, and the lucky student gets a few bonus points for finishing grading. They keep taking these quizzes endlessly with some answers people know and one new answer that no one does. The teacher is the bank, the students are participants in the blockchain, the quizzes are blocks, the questions that everyone knows are transactions that can be checked for validity, the answer that no one knows is the proof of work solution that must be produced (proof of stake would be like a rock paper scissors tournament among the students with already good grades to determine whose grading skills should be trusted), and the wall at the back of the class is launched into outer space travelling away at the speed of light so no one can get to it without breaking the laws of physics.