What is Blockchain: Finally a Simple Guide!

Blockchain is presented as the disruptive technology for the coming years, with Bitcoin as the widest-spread and best-known example of a cryptocurrency based on this technology.

You know bitcoin, that weird funny money that everyone is talking about. However for this discussion I want to stay far away from Bitcoin. You and I will be focusing only on the blockchain application that makes this all possible.

Just last year, a record-breaking $1 billion so far has been pumped into Bitcoin and blockchain-related tech startups. 22 leading banks have recently announced plans to back an industry initiative to accelerate the acceptance of “distributed ledger technologies to the global financial markets.

The blockchain is designed to make transactions safe and reliable even if the people doing them don’t trust each other.
Geek Talk:

The blockchain is a way to structure data, and the foundation of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. This coding breakthrough—which consists of concatenated blocks of transactions—allows competitors to share a digital ledger across a network of computers without need for a central authority. No single party has the power to tamper with the records: the math keeps everyone honest. Forty of the world’s top financial firms are experimenting with the tech.
Side note: Concatenation: In formal language theory and computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining character strings end-to-end.