Blockchain - in "up goer five" style

3 min read

(I made this with the "Simple Writer" that a man called Randall Munro made. I sometimes have to tell people about blockchain, so I thought I would try to do it so lots of people could know about it even if they don't like hard words)

New money things are built of lots of hidden information. Hiding this information means you have to make special new money and give it to people who hide information for you in a special game. The one who guesses right in the "hiding the information" game gets the money. Lots of people want to play the game, so it gets hard. Playing the "Hide the information" game means you use a lot of power and need to have special computers.

Mostly the information that is hidden is about spending money. Some people want to use the "hide the information" game to hide other kind of information, like how you did at school. But sometimes they forget how much power you need to play the game.

Once some people used the "hide the information" game to hide the idea for another game. But the idea was wrong and they couldn't change it (because once you hide information in the game, you are not allowed to change it). So people lost their money, and they were so sad that they broke that "hide the information" game to get it back. Now there are two games, and the people are cross with each other.

The money that the main "hide the information" game makes is not like normal money. With normal money there can always be more, but with the money from the game once all the money is made there can be no more. When that happens they will have to pay people to play the game, which will make the game different. If the information you want to hide as part of the game is to do with not much money, the players might not want to put it in the game, as they won't make enough money to pay for their special computers and their power.

Sometimes the new money made in the game means the same as a lot of normal money, and sometimes it is only the same as a little bit. This can make using the new money very hard, but as people get to know about the new money it might get easier. Some of the people who thought up the game wanted to make things so people who run countries couldn't be the same people who ran money. If everyone used the new money this would make it hard to run countries.

So the special money and the "hide the information" game are interesting and fun to look at and think about, but it can be quite hard to think of new ways to use the game that are good. But lots of people still try, because people are very interested in the game.