When I was ten years of age, we used to play football in our neighborhood.

Funny enough, we used to play without a referee. Everyone knows the rules, and everyone knows what the score is at a time, and you can't change the score without convincing every player that there is an excellent reason to do so. And there was no good reason to do.

It felt good to play by our own rules.

A referee is what we call centralization. And, of course, no referee is decentralization. We play by our own rules.

The blockchain works similarly. Each node or player in a blockchain-based network has an identical copy of the network’s ledger of events, and that ledger is immutable(cannot be tampered with).

So both my childhood football game and blockchain achieved a situation where multiple participants have an agreed-upon historical record of events. That record(score) cannot be tampered with.

We always find a way to agree

If one player in our football messes up with something for some reason, a decision is quickly made among the players to either act upon the player who messed up or let the game continue by consent.

We kept the score in our heads

The “ledger part” is the current score that all the players keep in their heads, and every player doesn’t need to see each goal being scored as long as they all agree on what the current score is.

Note: Football is called soccer in some parts of the world!