What is Blockchain?

Blockchain technology becomes important besides the fields of computer science and finance and has found its way in many other industries including the Arts themselves. 

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A blockchain is a digital ledger secured by cryptography and decentralization. By distributing the same copy of the ledger on many different computers, there is not one entity that governs over its content, its content and the truth of what  it contains is distributed. Blockchain is distributed power and it is 100% transparent.  This ledger can contain many different things. The first and most prominent is its use case as a ledger for currency. The first currency of this kind was bitcoin. Many others followed with added or different functionality. 

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With the advent of Ethereum many new possibilities opened up. Ethereum is a programmable blockchain, meaning a script can be directly deployed on the Ethereum blockchain and this script can contain whatever you want. These scripts are called smart contracts as they define contracts between two or more individuals that are secured by the blockchain technology.  All kind of „tokens“ are now defined on Ethereum, these can be their own currency – based on Ethereum – or non-fungible tokens, called NFTs. Nowadays there are more blockchains that are or aim to be smart-contract blockchains as Ethereum, these include for example Polkadot, Cardano or Solana.