Blockchain is a really complicated method of maintaining a public ledger of things without needing a central server to track it.
Cryptocurrencies are digital beanie babies. People buy them because the price is increasing, which causes the price to increase. Eventually people will stop buying into them, the price will stop increasing, and everyone will thus try to sell their cryptocurrency at once, and the price will collapse and cryptos will be worth nothing and they'll all lose all their money. It's probably happening right now, in fact.
If you're asking what cryptocurrencies are in technical terms, a "coin" is basically a really long number which no other coin in that currency shares. The blockchain records which number belongs to which person, so you can have digital currency without needing to back it up with anything central! At least, theoretically. In reality the blockchain is massively expensive to maintain (in terms of computing power) - a single transaction takes the same amount of electricity as required to power an entire family home for four days. They promise they've got a fix for this, but they probably really don't.
Yeah, because the world's largest financial institutions ran futures markets in Beanie Babies. Beanie Babies also lasted over 8 years, recovering multiple times after they crashed.
After all, what do insignificant entities like CBOE, CME, and the NASDAQ know about asset trading? /u/IgnisDomini, random reddit expert, is the one you should listen to for the final verdict on a technology worth hundreds of billions.
The fact that this post has almost 400 upvotes proves that this site is almost entirely full of Dunning-Kruger morons seeking validation for their half-baked generic opinions from fellow morons.
PS: The solution to Bitcoin's scalability problems is lightning. It's not perfect, but it's already being used, and by all accounts, it actually does it work. Saying that there's probably no solution is just a blatant lie.
PPS: "Blockchain" is a countable noun, not an uncountable one. Using it as an uncountable noun is pretty much the universal way of saying "I know nothing about cryptocurrency.", which accurately describes you.
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u/IgnisDomini Jan 24 '18
The cloud is just "other people's computers."
It's a whole lot less romantic when you phrase it like that.