On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Blockchain is a technology that creates a secure and transparent ledger of transactions that can be shared among multiple parties without intermediaries. Blockchain can enable decentralized applications such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, supply chain management, etc. But how does blockchain work? And what are its benefits and challenges? In this blog post, we will try to answer these questions and give you a detailed understanding of blockchain technology. How Does Blockchain Work? A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. Blockchains are best known for their crucial role in cryptocurrency systems, such as Bitcoin, for maintaining a secure and decentralized record of transactions. A blockchain consists of two main components: blocks and transactions. A block is a collection of transactions that are validated and added to the ledger by th...