What is Blockchain ?
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain, also known as block chain technology, is one of the main factors contributing to the success of bitcoin. The interest of fintech experts in blockchain was the cause of the continuous increase in bitcoin price during 2017. So what makes this technology so valuable ?
Learn more: Blockchain 3.0
First of all, blockchain solves the problem of information validation. Specifically, the blockchain is a shared list of records with all the transactions so that anyone on the network can see and have the right to verify the transaction. All information and transactions are recorded in blocks. And the advantage of blockchain is to ensure that the blocks have been recorded.
The blockchain is resistant to the modification of data. Whenever a new block is mined successfully, the whole system will be notified, thus ensuring the transparency and fairness of the information. The blockchain system consists of hundreds to millions of personal computers, making the database not only hierarchical but also independently distributed. It means that there is no central server on that peer-to-peer network where every node shares the equal rights.. Therefore, if one node fails to connect to the network or does not work any more, it will not affect the system in general.
Learn more: What is Blockchain Platform ?
Blockchain software building
Blockchain software building
So it has completes the brief introduction to blockchain. It can be seen that blockchain can be applied to not only cryptocurrency but many other aspects. In fact, cryptocurrency is just one application of blockchain. Let’s think outside the box to see the unlimited potential of blockchain. Is it complicated to build a blockchain software?
Let’s start off with building the blocks. In blockchain, each block contains information such as a timestamp and an index (optional). The blocks will determine the hash for the completed process. Like bitcoin, each block’s hash will be a cryptographic one of the block’s index, timestamp, data, and the hash of the previous block’s hash. The data can be anything you want.
After having a block structure. We need to have the blocks linked together to create a blockchain. So how does each block have information of its previous block? Please pay attention to the genesis block, the first block of the blockchain. The genesis block does not contain the hash of its previous block (since it is the first block). It can be added manually or via a certain logic. We will create a function that simply returns a genesis block to make things easy. The index of this block is set to 0 and it has an arbitrary data value and an arbitrary value of "previous hash" parameter.
Learn more: What is the application of Blockchain
It's hard to provide a step-to-step guide to building a blockchain software with the limited length of this writing. Therefore, only the brief introduction to blockchain software, the way it works and some programming tips are discussed in this piece of writing. If you are an experienced programmer, you can build a simple blockchain software base on these information.
