What is blockchain?

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire talks with Recode's Kara Swisher and The Verge's Lauren Goode about blockchain, the technology that makes bitcoin and other digital currencies possible. Allaire says blockchains are a modern record-keeping system and that integrating them into our lives is analogous to the move from using America Online in the late 1990s to the more open, global web that exists today. Circle previously let users trade bitcoins and today it continues to focus on social payments, but Allaire argues that blockchains have important implications for everything from computing to property ownership to voting.