Blockchain technology.

Anagha Sathyapal
Blockchain Experts
Published in
5 min readDec 22, 2017

In this blog, i am going to share something deeper about Blockchain technology and its underlying concepts. The definition of blockchain says ‘The Blockchain is a public ledger used to record all the transaction happened in a particular network’. Currently, Blockchain technology is spreading over different areas like trading, file storage, identity management, medical records management and education etc. Since Blockchain is growing in such a wide range and speed there should be a strong and secure data structure behind this in order to support the entire system.

image resource from www.blockchainexpert.uk

those who don’t have any idea about blockchain implementation this blog will help you surely.. read on, Let’s explore ‘how exactly blockchain is implemented?’ You might have heard about the concept Distributed computing and our renowned Linked list Data structure. The blockchain is a well-blended combination of these two concepts.

Blocks are the basic building units of the blockchain. First, we will create a block and then link this block to the chain. There won’t be any isolated blocks in the blockchain. All the blocks are linked together. So let’s see how a block really looks like.

Blocks are the fundamental building units of the blockchain. First, we’ll produce a block and then link this block to the chain. There won’t be any isolated blocks within the blockchain. All the blocks are joined together. therefore let’s see how a block really seems like.

Block
Just like a linked list, the Blockchain is an assortment of blocks joined along, where every block can have the subsequent fields.
1)Block: it is used to store the block value
2) Nonce: an arbitrary value used for finding a valid hash price.
3) Data: Store the data (transaction details)
4) Prev: Store the hash of the previous block
5) Hash: Hash value for this block which might be used to refer this block.

Hash
The hash value is that the most significant factor in a block. The hash value is exclusive and it represents a single block in a very blockchain. it’s obtained using a hash function algorithm like SHA 256 or keccak-25. The hash value is used to verify the validity of the block. a valid block can have a hash value that starts with four zeros. The hash value beginning with four zeros is an invalid block, and additional mining ought to be done on that specific block so as to create that block validly.

The mining process is completed by a miner, who is liable for the validation of the blocks/transactions in a Blockchain. The mining process relies on Merkle Root of the block, timestamp, previous block etc. once the mining process, a valid hash key is generated that is a unique value. The nonce value is that the number of Hash outs we’ve to perform to get a legitimate hash value. therefore the nonce value also will modification once the hashing. sometimes the miner needs to perform a number of Hash outs before obtaining the desired hash value. Whenever a new block is superimposed to the Blockchain it should contain the hash value of the previous block and a default hash value for that represents the particular block.

As per the distributed nature of the blockchain, all the nodes within the distributed network can have a constant copy of the blockchain and whenever a transaction happens within the network it’ll be updated in its corresponding block (only after verification) and it should be updated in other peers also. but what if two totally different|completely different} peers got different hash value and both claim as valid? in this case, a democratic technique is applied for verification. The hash value that majority of the peers having will be considered as the original value.

Tokens
The token is a terminology used in Blockchain to manage monetary transactions. All the digital asset movements within the network are recorded within the tokens known as ‘tx’. every block contains a token within which the transactions are recorded and we can see any transactions between 2 clients here. The Miners dig through the dealings history of the clients to validate a new transaction. Since the miner has the copy of the public ledger, it’s very simple to go through completely different blocks and verify the transactions. For validating a monetary transaction, the miner can ensure that the client who transferred the amount will have that abundant amount in his wallet. He will verify it by checking the transactions history of the client. If the client doesn’t possess that a lot of amounts, then the miner won’t validate that transaction.

Coinbase
in the case of the primary transaction of a client, it is impractical to validate the amount as he doesn’t have a transaction history to examine. in this case, the Blockchain uses a terminology known as ‘Coinbase’ to initiate the transaction. every client can have a ‘Coinbase’ and he will directly place some amount to the current Coinbase. Then the opposite transactions will be continuing from here.

Immutable Nature of blocks
Since each node has the copy of the whole Blockchain, the safety is a prime concern here. in a Blockchain, the safety is maintained by the immutable nature of blocks. Once you added a block in a Blockchain it can’t be modified. you may add a new block, but you can’t create changes within the previously added block. The Blockchain immutableness is obtained with the 2 properties of the hash
1. it’s very exhausting to calculate the original information from the hash.
2. a small modification of the data can create an enormous change in the hash value.
Being a distributed system, immutable nature of the blocks are essential in blockchains. Since all the nodes in the network have a similar copy of the data anybody may create modifications on the block. but because of the immutable nature of the blocks, once a data is entered to the blockchain any changes on the data will be simply known by its hash value.

This nature is dangerous too since a small modification in data will create huge changes in the hash value. moreover, the likelihood of the data loss is extremely less as each node keeps the copy of entire blocks.

believe you’ve got a whole picture of the Blockchain data structure and its actual implementation. we’ll cover a lot of attention-grabbing topics in forthcoming blogs.

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