“Technically, a blockchain is simple. It’s an append-only ledger (using a data structure called a Merkle tree) — like an account book where you can only add new entries, not alter or remove old ones — and some mechanism to decide who adds the next entry. You can distribute copies of the ledger, and anyone receiving one can check they have a good copy. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.44* Blockchains are really simple — and when normal people find out what a blockchain actually is, they go: “What? That’s not magical at all. How do they get all of the nonsense I’ve read out of that?”