While most people are still trying to figure out how cryptocurrency can work at all, the illuminated tech folks at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) were trying to figure out how to tear it apart to examine its inner workings and use different elements: specifically, how to use the blockchain in everything from monitoring agricultural crops to manufacturing to banking. Here’s why.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to catch the public imagination, spurring a host of others that now make the headlines. But to do business with a currency focused on anonymity, several major functions are required, not the least of which is the ledger that keeps track of transactions.

Traditional ledger systems record who was responsible for a transaction and should be resistant to tampering. To address this, cryptocurrency employs a distributed record of all the transactions, so that no one person could trivially manipulate the ledger. This is called the blockchain (originally “block chain“).

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