Summary

In this chapter, I continued covering some of the fundamental building blocks and core concepts of the blockchain—blocks, chains, and some of the existing consensus algorithms.

In the section about blocks, I covered what a block actually is, how it compares with pages in a book, and told what is stored in such a block. You then learned what the structures of different types of blocks are, including its block header, and then studied how blocks are hashed and how the nonce is calculated that is needed to generate the correct target hash.

I continued covering the fundamentals by explaining how blocks are chained together to form the actual blockchain and how these blocks are distributed to all nodes in the decentralized network using a managed peer-to-peer protocol. I went through the process of how nodes can detect that the content of a block is maliciously modified. I explained that this same process can also detect accidental forks in the chain, which happens when multiple block are...