Distributed systems
Understanding distributed systems is essential to our understanding blockchain, as blockchain was a distributed system at its core. It is a distributed ledger that can be centralized or decentralized. A blockchain is originally intended to be and is usually used as a decentralized platform. It can be thought of as a system that has properties of the both decentralized and distributed paradigms. It is a decentralized-distributed system.
Distributed systems are a computing paradigm whereby two or more nodes work with each other in a coordinated fashion to achieve a common outcome. It is modeled in such a way that end users see it as a single logical platform. For example, Google's search engine is based on a large distributed system; however, to a user, it looks like a single, coherent platform.
A node can be defined as an individual player in a distributed system. All nodes are capable of sending and receiving messages to and from each other. Nodes...