Data and infrastructure
A blockchain is a digital register shared among many computers, in which information is written in blocks linked one to the next, and which can no longer be deleted or changed in secret.
The simplest picture is an account book of which every participant holds an identical copy: each new line is checked by everyone before it is written, and if someone tries to change an old line in their copy, the other copies contradict it at once. That is why no central authority, such as a bank or a notary, is needed to guarantee the register is true: the fact that everyone holds it is the guarantee. Each block carries a digital fingerprint (hash) of the previous one, and changing one would break the chain. The idea of timestamping digital documents in a chain comes from Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta (1991); the first working blockchain was born in 2009 with Bitcoin, the digital currency described in 2008 by an author who remains anonymous, Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2015 Ethereum, conceived by Vitalik Buterin, added smart contracts, small programs that carry out an agreement on their own when the conditions are met. Since 2018 the European Union has been building its own infrastructure, EBSI (European Blockchain Services Infrastructure), to certify diplomas and public documents across member states. Beyond digital currencies it is useful wherever several parties who do not know each other must trust the same data: tracing a supply chain, a degree, a certificate of authenticity.
An example
A wine bottle carries a code: by scanning it, the customer sees on a blockchain the vineyard, the harvest date and every step to the shelf, recorded by the different players in the supply chain and which none of them can touch up afterwards.
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