[Hexayurt]

"by the end of this article, you’re going to understand blockchains well enough to decide what they mean to your life."

I very deliberately didn't explain mining or blocks or consensus protocols because, really, that's technical gubbins that fits between "BEGIN TRANSACTION" and "COMMIT TRANSACTION" in an SQL database.

Unless your technical concerns are between those two statements, you don't need to care about mining. That's where we've been going wrong explaining blockchains so far.

[natch]

I already understand mining. I didn't need to learn about mining. It's just looking for hashes with successively larger numbers of zeros at the ends as the difficulty increases (or the other way around.. the difficulty increases as the zeros do). But I wanted to understand the blockchain, which I didn't, and still don't. Apparently it being distributed is important in some way, and there is some mechanism by which it gets updated with records of recent transactions (again nothing to do with mining) but I don't know the details, and would like to. The promise was not fulfilled. But otherwise, great article. BTW I have no database background but do know what a transaction is.