Blockchains: The Puzzle That Never Ends

Imagine a digital puzzle where each piece is a record of a transaction, and the pieces are held together by cryptography and a dash of paranoia.

Here's how it works:

1. Someone, somewhere, creates a new puzzle piece (a block). This piece contains a record of many transactions.
2. The puzzle piece is then given a unique identifier (a hash) that makes it virtually unchangeable.
3. The puzzle piece is added to a public ledger (the blockchain), where it's locked in place by the collective efforts of many computers.
4. Each computer that has a copy of the ledger updates its own version to include the new puzzle piece, and then sends out a challenge to all the other computers: 'Hey, does your copy match mine?'
5. If someone's copy doesn't match, they get kicked off the network (a process known as 'forgotten and left to cry in the corner').
6. The process repeats, with each puzzle piece building on the last, creating an unbreakable chain of transactions.

And that's it! That's the basics of blockchain. Now go forth and build your own, or, at the very least, pretend to.

Disclaimer: The above explanation was not written by an expert, but by someone with a passing familiarity with the subject.