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Comment by TheSisb2 | Hacker News Reader

The first two paragraphs seemed to be directed towards the layman, and then the author takes a tangent with: "For example, the block chain (distributed transaction history) is designed to be extremely hard to forge and very easy to verify." You lost me completely.

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The bitcoin blockchain is a replicated database (not distributed, as this guy claims) which contains a copy of each and every bitcoin transaction ever made since the beginning of time. It's basically how they 'solve' the so-called double spending problem where a digital coin can be duplicated (spent twice) unless there is some way to verify the uniqueness of said coin. Given a total history of every transaction ever made, a recipient can check whether a coin hasn't been already given to someone else by the sender.

The idea is that anyone can participate in the peer-to-peer network that maintains this database, and that this database is signed on a block-by-block basis by the participants to maintain consensus. Hence the term 'block chain'.

Now, since the data in the block chain is a set of time-stamped transactions that are difficult to forge (unless someone controls >50% of the network), one can use it to store other time stamped information such as contracts.

(disclaimer: the above is just a semi-laymans attempt to explain the block chain to OP, feel free to correct me where I am wrong:)

(One of the better explanations I've seen). Indeed, the bitcoin.org website claims that the blockchain is the central innovation in Bitcoin (since the rest of the ecash crypto has been around for decades)

Actually, the transactions can't be forged. If someone has > 50% of the network, they can double-spend, but they can't forge transactions.

The block chain is a very simple concept: it's the permanent record of all bitcoin transactions ever made.

For example, hash(document) is extremely hard to forge and very easy to verify.

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