I first started hearing about blockchain and bitcoin about 4 years ago and filed it away as something interesting but didn't dig any deeper. Recently blockchain has broken into the public consciousness, largely due to interest in cryptocurrencies and their meteoric rise in value. I started listening to Laura Chin's Unchained podcast at Forbes where she interviews interesting people in the blockchain space and found myself falling down the rabbit hole, absorbing as much as I can about the history, present, and possible future of blockchain and how it may (or may not) change our lives. As usual, when trying to make sense of new information, I like to spill what I'm learning on to paper. So above is a quick braindump from listening to Laura's podcast. It's very high level---a bunch of individual words and phrases, each of which represent complexity which I'm just beginning to explore. And why explore this topic at all? Partly it's just the pleasure of learning something new, but it's more than just that. This may be a massively transformative technology, akin to the internet, so it makes sense to jump in while it's still relatively early days.