Blockchain

The term blockchain is rapidly emerging, developing, morphing and expanding in context as is this Wikiversity learning resource. We have posted this collection of thoughts and initiated a discussion hoping to find out how the academic treatment and understanding of cryptocurrency and distributed computing may remain open, free, liberated and independent in generic form into the future.

Bitcoin

The blockchain began as a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. According to Wikipedia:

A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: maintenance of the blockchain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software. Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to payee Z are broadcast to this network using readily available software applications. Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.

As a distributed database, a way is needed to independently verify the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount). The blockchain is a ledger stored on each network node as a copy of the "original" set of transactions. Every ten minutes or so, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the chain, and quickly published to all nodes.

In Wikipedia's article:

This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.

Wikipedia has no discrete article blockchain but REDIRECT to w:Bitcoin#block_chain

Ethereum

From w:Ethereum

The stated purpose of the Ethereum project is to "decentralize the web" by introducing four components as part of its Web 3.0 roadmap: static content publication, dynamic messages, trustless transactions and an integrated user-interface. These are each designed to replace some aspect of the Web experience we currently take for granted, but to do so in a fully decentralised and pseudonymous manner.

It's important to identify and define the blockchain in a liberated way. Bitcoin, by definition can't monopolize the terms. Ethereum adds some features and frills:

The basic unit of the internal currency is called ether, which is divided into smaller units of currency called finney, szabo, shannon, babbage, lovelace, and wei.[1] Each larger unit is equal to 1000 of the next lower unit, so 1000 finney is 1 ether, 1000 szabo is 1 finney, and so on.

The Libre Blockchain

w:Libre ... to be continued