What is Blockchain?

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a system of recording information in a way that makes it very difficult or nearly impossible to change, hack, corrupt or cheat the system.

A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin created by Satoshi Nakamoto uses the concept of Blockchain, bitcoin whitepaper introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency called "Bitcoin"

suspected image of Satoshi Nakamoto

How does Blockchain work?

For understanding the working of blockchain we have to know three things first

• Blocks
• Miners
• & Nodes

Blocks

Every chain in the Blockchain consist of multiple blocks and each of these blocks has three basic elements.

• data, data in the block, can be anything that you want to store in the chain.
• Nonce , a nonce is the randomly generated 32-bit whole number generated when a block is created, it also generates block header hash.
• hash, a hash is a 256-bit number related to the nonce.

Miners

Miners are the one which create the new blocks on the blockchain which is called Mining

Mining is not an easy job as in blockchain each and every block has its own hash and nonce and also references the hash of the previous block, it increases the complexity and makes it hard for miners to mine. but when a block is mined the change is accepted by all the nodes and the miner gets rewarded financially

Can you make changes to the earlier mined block?

Yes, you can but making a change to any block earlier in the chain requires re-mining of not just the block with the change, but also all of the blocks that come after. This is the reason which makes blockchain extremely difficult to manipulate

Nodes

Nodes can be any kind of electronic device that maintains copies of the blockchain and keeps the network functioning, every node has its own copy of the blockchain, since everything in the blockchain is transparent everything that happens in the network can be easily checked and verified.

Thank you for reading hope you understand if you find anything wrong let me know in the comment