All in all, a blockchain is the combination of several instruments that come together to provide an infrastructure to exchange digital value and assert the truth without the need of a central entity.
As discussed throughout this chapter, a blockchain is composed of a network of users, nodes, and miners that respectively send/receive, store, and validate transactions. Cryptography (and more specifically hash functions) is used in this configuration to create an output (a hash) that refers to any kind of digital information, for example, to refer to a batch of transactions. Blocks cluster these transactions and include metadata associated with the block itself such as the previous hash, the timestamp, and the nonce. Public and private keys provide a way to efficiently manage identities in the digital world and more specifically in the network. In a blockchain...
