What does the blockchain represent?

5

What does the blockchain represent? Is it the current balance of each account or is it the complete ledger?

Yash

Posted 2016-06-25T12:07:18.900

Reputation: 151

Hello Yash, Welcome to Bitcoin.SE. Those are some interesting questions, but posts with multiple topics don't work well on our site. Please only ask about one topic per post. You can read a discussion about this here: Should we split up posts that ask many questions at once? I'll edit your post down to one question, please post the others as separate posts. Thank you.

Murch 2016-06-25T12:31:02.327

You can get back to your full post by reading the edit history, so you'll only need to copy your questions.

Murch 2016-06-25T12:38:55.570

Answers

6

The blockchain is the complete transactional history of Bitcoin. It collects every transaction performed in blocks which each are linked to their predecessor block.

By parsing the complete blockchain, you can discover all unspent balances. These are usually tied to addresses, which represent users much like email addresses do.

Also see these two related questions:

Murch

Posted 2016-06-25T12:07:18.900

Reputation: 41 609