I still don't understand blockchain.

I've read a lot of articles about blockchain and cryptocurrency and still don't understand it completely. the part I'm missing is the storage part (which is the main thing I guess). is the data stored in pieces in every device, or how does this go? what if someone unplugs their device, what happens to the info of my wallet that was stored on that device?

3blue1brown got you covered https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4

You read wrong articles then mate.

You’re not alone.

It's not real.

dis you speak with your duck about this?

Visibly, you're not the only one who doesn't understand it here.

Lemme rewrite my last comment, cause I made some mistakes

So cryptos are essentially a distributed linked list. That's the structure of a "blockchain"

So in short, all the data is stored on all the nodes (users). Thus unless everyone goes offline at the same time, your data is available online.

This could be changed in implementation, and something like a DHT could be use to only store the data in pieces. Afaik Bitcoin doesn't do this though.

If you have a wallet but don't have the entire blockchain history in your pc (several gigabytes, was like 70 last time I connected) then you're not managing your own wallet, but probably using a centralized service somewhere else where they have an entire copy of the chain. Which is possible, but eh...

I assume someone will correct me on everything I got wrong anyway. The point is, blockchains are an incredibly dumb and simple technology used in an interesting way

In theory, if every node shuts down, yes, your concern is correct, Blockchain will shut down, it is under the assumption that it won't shut down.

But, a single node, or many nodes? no, that won't affect a large network, once the node starts again, it will get a fresh copy of Blockchain.

If 51% or more nodes decide to get malicious together, it will be disaster, but, that too is assumed to never happen in a large network, that's why new Blockchains are started by trusted people till it grows enough.

@Hazarth wow, tysm. the missing piece for me was how it is stored, now it all makes sense bcz 70GB is kinda next to nothing.

@adnanjpg

https://ycharts.com/indicators/...

70GB was when I last used it, which was years ago

now it's at 340.75 GB

@Hazarth Gotta spend 0.0013 bitcoins to buy a new 2 TB HDD to store that blockchain.