People who understand Bitcoin realise that "blockchain" isn't really a technology, it's just a simple sequential file with linking between adjacent records. However, the word seems to have captured the imagination of the public, and there are many who have jumped on an expanded concept to push their own products. There seem to be a lot of people who assume that "The Blockchain" is synonymous with Bitcoin, and this is far from the truth. We constantly see products being publicised with major omissions from the Bitcoin concept. - no proof of work, no cryptography, no distributed ledger, centralised control, no public blockchain access, no significant peer community and many others.
It would appear that "The Blockchain" is here to stay as a descriptive phrase, so how can we get some consensus as to the elements that are basic to the "technology"?
those that know databases. know the old terms of
DBMS
and later
RDBMS.
for blockchain lets just go with
BRDBMS
then when talking about bitcoin (yes im going extreme now)
bitcoin=
PDP2PECDSASHA256POW BRDBMS
publicly distributed peer2peer ecdsa encrypted signatures sha256 cryptographically secured proof of work blockswhere hyperledger
CSHA512POA BRDBMS
centralised sha512 cryptographically secured proof of authorityyea my examples are not accurate. but there are a million and one ways to try explaining it. to those that need to know.
as for the laymens terminology..
blockchain is simply and only CHAINing BLOCKs of data together.
as for:
HOW its chained EG via sha, or md5 or other hashing. is not required as thats subjective and optional
HOW the chain is secured. EG PoW PoS PoA. is not required as thats subjective and optional
WHAT type of data is stored in the blocks, EG financial, medical, DNS, Identity. is not required as thats subjective and optional
WHAT rate data the data grows at. is not required as thats subjective and optional
WHERE the data is stored. eg on one system, private network or public network. . is not required as thats subjective and optional
these things are outside the scope of blockchain and are extra layers ontop