Редактирование: Blockchain/en (раздел)

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A '''blockchain''' is a distributed ledger in which transactions are incorporated into cryptographically secure blocks. This allows a trustless, peer-to-peer method for achieving consensus, and was a solution to a long standing unsolved problem in computer science known as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance Byzantine Generals Problem]. A valid chain is one which at least 51% of the network agrees is the longest. Computations supporting the network are performed by 'miners', programs which maintain a copy of the longest chain and use brute force computation to discover the next block, which will be some cryptographic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function hash function] that satisfies the encrypted header of the previous block, for bitcoin this function is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2 SHA-2], other cryptocurrencies use different functions, for example Litecoin uses [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt Scrypt]. Blockchain was first described by [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Satoshi Nakamoto] in 2009 and applied to the bitcoin protocol. Distributed currency grew from the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk cypherpunk] movement in the 1980s and 1990s and is a successor to the earlier [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash hashcach] system.