The building blocks of blockchain
Blockchain technology is built over a group of existing technologies that have been widely used across the industry. Let's go through each component of blockchain, which together make the entire system distributed, immutable, and reliable in nature.
Block
A distributed ledger is stored in a database and updated by each participant in the blockchain network. A ledger is represented in a series of units called blocks. To understand the block, lets start with the underlying traditional data model and then jump to the blockchain network to understand how the block is chained together.
Let's first understand the regular means of information exchange over the internet. In the world of the TCP/IP stack, information is transferred through a client/server model where the client can store and modify the data on a centralized server. However, the control of the database remains with a designated administrator. If the security of the administrator is compromised, the entire...