As many people still do not understand what a blockchain is, I have decided to come up with my own definition. Hopefully it will assist others in understanding the basics of blockchains and cryptos.

A blockchain is a digital karma. In some religions, the spiritual karma is a person’s track record of actions. The karma keeps a full record of a person’s actions. This full track record can never be erased, and its past history cannot be modified. Your spiritual karma is an append-only database of all of your actions up to the present which, according to some religions, determines what can happen to you today and in the future. The spiritual karma is an append-only database because it stores the full record of your actions and because information can only be added, never subtracted. In some religions such as Hinduism and Spiritism, the karma is the core mechanism that ensures spiritual justice through the spiritual law of action and reaction: you will harvest what you have sowed. In the case of Hinduism and Spiritism, the karma also extends across a person’s many reincarnations. You will harvest in this life what you have sowed in past lives.

The blockchain technology has the same function as that of karma, albeit with regards to digital assets like Bitcoin or NFTs rather than to a person. The blockchain does in the digital domain what the karma does in the spiritual domain: it keeps a full record of all transactions in an append-only database whose past history can never be erased or modified. No past information can be subtracted or modified. Information on transactions can only be added, never subtracted. Most importantly, the blockchain accomplishes this feature without resorting to any third party enforcement.

As I have argued in my recent paper on Bitcoin, co-authored with my colleague Edemilson Paraná, the Bitcoin blockchain was the first blockchain to implement the de facto (not de jure) private property of a digital asset without resorting to third party enforcement. The Bitcoin blockchain was the very first technology to stablish the logic of private ownership over a digital asset that, in principle, could be reproduced indefinitely at zero marginal cost. And the Bitcoin blockchain accomplished this enforcement of private property rights over digital assets without any third party enforcement of property rights. A truly innovative accomplishment in the digital domain, as it was this key feature of the Bitcoin blockchain that made Bitcoin so successful as a digital asset.

In sum, a blockchain is the digital karma of a digital asset. In the spiritual karma, you can only harvest love if you have yourself sowed love. In the blockchain, which is a digital karma, you can only sell a digital asset if you have yourself acquired it beforehand via digital mining or by trading it. The blockchain functions analogously to the spiritual karma by keeping a full record of all actions (the transactions of a digital asset) in a decentralized and permission-less append-only database.

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