☄️Blockchain Economy

When you hear the word “blockchain”, most often it is pronounced in conjunction with “bitcoin” . But it’s not all that straightforward.

Blockchain is a technology for storing and transferring data, managed by a large number of strangers — miners.

There are probably more than 10,000 blockchains today. Most blockchains are either public or private

You can see four parallel lines of different colors, that’s how you can visualize blockchains — parallel, and therefore non-intersecting and incompatible with each other, totally dissimilar technologically, and created for different purposes.

In the U.S. the main currency is USD, in the UK — GBP, in China — CNY. So all blockchains, like countries, have their own main coin. In the picture above, they are in the center, and often have the same name as the blockchain itself: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT), etc.

Basic blockchain coins

For any network to work, its viability must be maintained by miners. Their work is complex and requires a lot of hardware and electricity to maintain. That’s why they ask for a fee for every transaction they process.

Commission price in the Etherium network (USD)

So, when James wants to transfer 1 bitcoin to Adam, he will have to pay a commission to the main network coin — Bitcoin, which is 0.000037 BTC (~$1.72). Usually processing by miners takes 2–5 minutes

If James was transferring Etherium (ETH) coin, he would pay 0.0059 ETH (~$23.28). And he would wait 1–2 minutes for the network to confirm.

Any other blockchain works the same way. It should be noted that when a transaction goes into the network, it gets queued for processing by the miners.

And if Adam urgently needs to get Bitcoin or Etherium from James, when he sends it, James can manually increase the fee he pays the miner. Then the transaction will go up in the queue and be processed faster.

In future articles we will look at other blockchains in more detail, but for now we will explain where their development began.