This is not reading material for kindergarteners. It is, however, for the benefit of kindergarteners and other young people who will live in a world where blockchain has much to do with their lives.

I have resisted writing about blockchain because it is complicated, with no good analogies. But since blockchain and its use will likely have a major effect on future generations, we must do our best to understand it and what it is expected to do.

A main goal of blockchain is to eliminate "intermediaries" such as banks, and since intermediaries have employees, blockchain will affect employment. More about this later.

Let's start with a little history. While many of the general technologies involved in blockchain existed before 2008, it was in that year a person (or group of people) named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the concept of Bitcoin in a white paper. The true identity of this person or group remains a mystery.

The goal of Bitcoin was to enable direct peer-to-peer payments without going through banks or credit card payment processors. At that time, blockchain was part of the Bitcoin system, but later emerged as a separate field. Blockchain is an entirely new type of record-keeping system.

Nakamoto faced a significant problem: convincing users that Bitcoins could be trusted as much as the U.S. dollar. It attempted to accomplish this by drawing on principles of cryptography coupled with a new record-keeping concept called distributed ledgers. These ledgers are located on many computers all over the world.

In blockchain terminology, ledgers are where transactions are recorded, and are grouped into "blocks." The number of transactions in a block depends on their size. When a block is full, it is secured by cryptographic hashing and "chained" to the previous block in the ledger. It is digitally locked in place. This is the blockchain.

Numerous computers in a blockchain contain exactly the same information; this facilitates security. Let's say Michael wants to sell Bitcoin to Alice. He executes this instruction, and it goes into a waiting room until it is transferred into a block. Then that block is digitally chained to the previous block. The blockchain verifies and records a change of ownership of Bitcoin from Michael to Alice, and cryptography executes the transfer. Bitcoin goes from Michael's "digital wallet" to Alice's.

The information for this transfer is recorded exactly the same way on all computers in the........

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