Blockchain Viewed from Mathematics

Abstract

Much of human activity involves assets, objects that hold value that can be transferred between users, such as gold, cash, or stocks. In the modern era, we want some assets to be digital, or stored entirely as computer data. Since there are no physical items (like gold bars) to represent such an asset, its existence is equivalent to having a computerized ledger (or state) of the asset, which keeps track of how much of the asset each user owns, and a protocol, a set of rules that define how the ledger changes and govern user actions involving the asset.