Crypto-what?
If you've attemptedto dive into this mysterious thing called blockchain, you'd be forgiven for recoiling in horror at the sheer opaqueness of the technical jargon that is often used to frame it. So before we get into just what a crytpocurrency is and how blockchain technology might change the world, let's discuss what blockchain actually is.

In the easiest terms, a blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions, not unlike the ledgers we've been using for hundreds of years to record sales and purchases. The event of the digital ledger is, actually, pretty much identical to a traditional ledger in that it records debits and credits between people. This is the core concept behind blockchain; the difference is who holds the ledger and who verifies the transactions.

With traditional transactions, a payment from one person to another involves some type of intermediary to facilitate the transaction. Let's say Rob wants to transfer �20 to Melanie. He is able to either give her cash in the form of a �20 note, or he can use some type of banking app to transfer the money directly to her bank-account. In both cases, a bank may be the intermediary verifying the transaction: Rob's funds are verified when he takes the money out of a cash machine, or they're verified by the app when he makes the digital transfer. The lender decides if the transaction is going ahead. The lender also holds the record of most transactions made by Rob, and is solely responsible for updating it whenever Rob pays someone or receives money into his account. In other words, the lender holds and controls the ledger, and everything flows through the bank.

That's a large amount of responsibility, so it is important that Rob feels he can trust his bank otherwise he'd not risk his money using them. He needs to feel confident that the lender will not defraud him, won't lose his money, will never be robbed, and can not disappear overnight. This dependence on trust has underpinned pretty much every major behaviour and element of the monolithic finance industry, to the extent that even when it was found that banks were being irresponsible with this money during the financial meltdown of 2008, the government (another intermediary) chose to bail them out instead of risk destroying the final fragments of trust by permitting them to collapse.

Best Wallets For Ethereum operate differently in one key respect: they're entirely decentralised. There is absolutely no central clearing house like a bank, and there is no central ledger held by one entity. Instead, the ledger is distributed across a massive network of computers, called nodes, all of which holds a copy of the entire ledger on their respective hard drives. These nodes are connected to one another via a software application called a peer-to-peer (P2P) client, which synchronises data across the network of nodes and makes certain that everybody gets the same version of the ledger at any given point in time