Cryptolesson 1: Blockchain Jane
Imagine if you will an elementary school classroom; but not an ordinary one. If it was a Catholic school, the kids would be rewarded by good grades, or slapped with a ruler by a nun. If it were the "School of Rock" you'd get rewarded for rebelling against authority or shredding some awesome guitar riffs. But nooo--this classroom is run by Jane Blockchain Crypto.
Jane is a math teacher. Her students had to do very tough math problems to meet state standards, but none were complying. What does she do to solve the problem? She turns each math workbook into a reward ledger. Each student is given a unique signature, and told every morning to open their math book/ledgers and "get to hashing out some answers". Concerned there may be cheating, whenever a student finishes hashing out an answer to a complex problem, Jane takes the book with the answer, and attaches it to a chain on the wall.
That book, remember, is also a ledger. When that student finishes his/her problem correctly, they are rewarded with a mark--an "A" on their ledger. These "A's" are actually spendable. The student can go to the bookstore or cafeteria, show proof of their unique signature, and "spend" some portion of that earned "A".
Whenever a student finishes, their booklet gets attached to the chain of ledgers. All the ledgers are updated by Jane. She has certain students (who used to bring her apples, but she hates apples) that she calls "nodes" to help her update the ledgers, which (because Jane is wise) she rewards in some way.
One day, Jane noticed some of the kids were buying calculators with their rewards, and all the kids were finishing a little faster, and the cafeteria and bookstore were being overwhelmed, and the record keeping was tough too, so she got the idea to make the problems tougher, and to lower the reward per solved problem to a "B". This helped a lot. Once she learned this trick, she set up a schedule, based on the number of students, how fast they worked, etc. and that would determine whether the reward would be a "C" or "D" and so on. Even an "F" with effort would be rewarded, as long as the problem was eventually solved.
Other teachers watched keenly what was happening. The Principles reward system was not quite as successful as Jane's and some of the staff at Money Elementary were getting a little nervous. One the one hand, Jane's students were blowing away the state standards. One the other hand, other teachers and students were getting a little jealous. Some created their own ledger systems. The Principle and Administrative staff's fiat rewards were always more familiar, so they kept being the norm--at least for now...
THIS IS BASICALLY HOW CRYPTO WORKS, AS BEST i UNDERSTAND IT. PLEASE LIKE IF IT HELPED.
If I get enough encouragement I might continue the story.