So Ive been trading for awhile now and I just have to know
what exactly IS a "blockchain"? Can I get a quick rundown?
It's the transaction record, a list of every single transaction that's happened within a given coin
>>2493028
why is that important? why is it the main point of every coin
>>2493035
what the fuck... just stop trading at this point
>>2492950
It's called Google youtube if you are a complete fucking autist.
>>2492950
it's a decentralized database
The reason the blockchain needs to exist is that it validates that you own the money that you hodl. Once you send it to another wallet, that wallet has to reconcile against the blockchain across several thousands of servers to prove that you own it. Basically it protects against duplication. There's more to it, but that's the normie rundown
>>2493090
thanks for the basic gesalt
>>2493035
The blockchain provides a way for everyone to know where coins come from, and whether or not they're real. If it weren't for the blockchain, someone would be able to create new coins and you wouldn't be able to know where they came from. But since every single transaction is recorded in the blockchain and confirmed by the miners, you can trust with 100% certainty that all coins are real.
>>2493035
Gonna try to be unusually nice for a 4chan post here. But do you know what a Ledger is? Well, a blockchain is a universal, decentralized (by redundantly being copied to many different nodes), and unambiguous ledger that is also secure, partly due to being a robust stack (a database that you can't modify without moving the whole data). It is what makes transactions between parties failsafe and also what makes the whole thing even able to function as a transaction currency, since the records each block contain are an "absolute" proof that two addresses have exchanged the blockchain's parent coin and even the order relating to other transactions.
So, if you do understand it at least for fiat currencies, it's the even more efficient and mathematically safe ledger of cryptocurrencies.