Holy buzzwords, batman. that page you linked is not designed to improve comprehension. It is also 500 words longer than the Bitcoin Whitepaper which is eight pages of plain English and eminently readable.

SIMPLY PUT

"the blockchain" is nothing more than a fancy way to say "distributed ledger." "distributed ledger" is nothing more than a fancy way to say "shit-tons of copies of a list." All these fancy-pants "visionaries" and "moguls" are eager for you to forget that the root word of "bitcoin" is "bittorrent" because then 41 patents at BofA looks irresponsible, rather than forward-looking. But fundamentally, it's BitTorrent.

And it works like this:

- There's a list. It has a bunch of trades on it. Joe sends bob 1. Sue sends mary 1. Mary sends ted 2.

- Everybody who's interested has a copy of that list. All new transactions are shouted through a megaphone to everyone with the list.

- The solution to a Sudoku is also shouted. And while everyone writes down all their transactions, they also try to solve the sudoku.

- First person to solve the Sudoku gets money. When money is awarded, everybody compares lists. People whose lists all match get to keep solving sudoku for money. Which means if your list doesn't match, you change your list so you can keep playing sudoku. If you insist that your list is better, they kick you out of the room so you can play Sudoku by yourself (or with whoever joins you).

It's been said that Bitcoin is a calculator and Ethereum is an iPhone. That's one way to demonstrate that "blockchain technology" can be used for more than just numbers. In the case of Ethereum, it's useful for programs. Crypto kitties are that, basically - it's a genetic algorithm running on the blockchain. For some reason, when bittorrent came out, everyone hated it but now that it's "the blockchain" everyone's all super-stoked.

Probably because positive money rather than negative money.

Same tech.