Texas Monthly; Getty
Two and a half years ago, Bitcoin crashed. The cryptocurrency fell from a peak value of nearly $20,000 in late 2017 to lows of about $3,200 a year later. The severe drop brought renewed scrutiny of the underlying technology, known as “blockchain,” as well as plentiful I-told-you-sos from critics.
Put as simply as possible, blockchain is a digital ledger on which transactions can be recorded anonymously across decentralized computer networks. When someone receives a Bitcoin, that asset is secured by a transaction ID, a unique string of numbers and letters. Bitcoin was the first, but other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Dogecoin, have joined the market. Bitcoin was designed as a finite resource—there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins—that must be “mined” by giving over computer power to the network that secures each Bitcoin transaction. The more computer power granted to the network, the more Bitcoins received as a reward.