The reasoning behind a decentralized blockchain

At the most basic level, the Ethereum blockchain is a set of connected blocks that contain information that many nodes share so that there's an unchangeable data structure to keep information permanently. The goal of any blockchain is to preserve information without the possibility of changing it or deleting it to avoid censorship or manipulation by external entities.

As such, the Ethereum blockchain builds upon that concept by implementing several well-known tools, thanks to Bitcoin and previous research to create programs that run on top of those blocks.

To understand how the Ethereum blockchain works internally, we have to understand each component that makes up a blockchain. First, I'll give you a high-level overview of the blockchain as a set of nodes, and then we'll go through each component from higher to lower levels in the pyramid that makes the blockchain.