Where are the actual blockchains for Ethereum located? Are these on End-user computers, or is there specialized computers that hold the blockchains.
p.s Is this one blockchain or many blockchains?
1 Answer
So as soon as you start your Ethereum client (e.g. Parity) it will start downloading a copy of the Blockchain to your local machine. So to answer your first question: There are many blockchains, one on each End-users computer.
Every client that syncs with the Ethereum network will have the very same copy of the Blockchain. To make sure that this is the case Ethereum uses some features of the blockchain technology which I won't cover in depth.
This makes it super fast to access data of the blockchain as you have it locally but it also incurs a significant amount of traffic. Your client has to sync all new blocks with the blockchain continuously.
Therefore there are also light clients that won't download a whole copy of a blockchain but only the parts (e.g. contracts) that are interesting for them.
If you are asking about where the blockchain is stored on your local machine check this question: Where can the parity blockchain files be found? (dependant on OS)
