Block

A block is a group of transactions that are permanently recorded on a cryptocurrency network. If you imagine a book of accounting, a ledger, a block would be the equivalent of one page of the ledger containing all the transactions on that particular page. Each block is timestamped, contains a link to the prior page, and has a mathematical problem attached to it. In the Bitcoin network, miners race to solve the mathematical problem in order to receive the reward for solving the current block. The miner that is able to find the solution, then shares the answer to the solved mathematical problem with the other miners in the network, and henceforth the block is validated. The blockchain is the entire chain of validated blocks going all the way back to the original block on the chain, ie., the genesis block. It is the whole book of accounting in our analogy, the entire ledger.