Crypto Basics

How can Humaniq liberate people from a reliance on the old,centralised banks, and how can we help make a more collaborative, peer-to-peer economy happen? How can we maintain a record of all transactions without banks, and offer financial services everywhere? Whether you want to know about the Blockchain or smart contracts, decentralised apps or gas, here we share the technical underpinnings of the Humaniq app and the HMQ cryptocurrency.

What is a Blockchain?

A blockchain is a new kind of internet, that makes an entirely new kind of banking possible. A blockchain frees people from the need for any big, central authority in order to simply transact and speak with each other. It is a shared, decentralised database run by a peer-to-peer network of computers or nodes, as opposed to the central server that runs traditional applications and websites. Every request to make a transaction, such as when one person agrees to lend money to another who wishes to borrow, is information that is distributed across this network, not stored in one place. The result is a permanent, incorruptible and secure record of each and every transaction, stored across the network publically and chronologically on what is referred to as a ‘digital ledger’ in ‘blocks’ of data.