Latin America's cryptocurrency

The fintech and crypto currency story has many potential starting points, but perhaps the best way 'in', for the purpose of this report, is to explain the emergence of two related things: Blockchain and Bitcoin. Adding mystery to the story, Blockchain was developed in 2008 by one Satoshi Nakamoto, a computer programmer who may or may not exist, or who could be a manufactured identity for a team of anonymous developers. The software he, or they, developed is a list of records, known as blocks, that are linked together in a chain using cryptography, a way of coding messages so that they can only be read by their intended recipients. Each block reproduces the previous one, adds additional transaction data, and contains a time stamp. Because of this, Blockchain has been likened to a secure, decentralised, and unbreakable open ledger, where, once recorded, data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.