Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 20

In order to understand cryptocurrency, you need to understand a little about blockchains. Blockchain technology is complicated, but that’s okay — you don’t need to understand everything. You just need to know the basics.

Blockchains are types of databases. A database is simply a collection of structured data. Say that you gather together a bunch of names, street addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers and type them into a word processor. That’s not a database. That’s just a jumble of text.

But say that you enter that data into a spreadsheet. The first column is the first name, the second is the person’s last name, and then you have columns for the email address, phone number, street address, city name, zip code, country, and so on — that’s structured data. That’s a database.

Most people use databases all the time. If you use some kind of financial management program, such as QuickBooks, Quicken, or Mint, your data is stored in a database. If you use a contact management program to store contact information, it’s stored in a database. Databases, behind the scenes, are an integral part of modern digital life.