Blockchain for Real World Applications

3 Blockchain Ecosystem

Distributed ledger technology (DLT), commonly known as “blockchain,” refers to the technology of working on decentralized databases that provides control over the evolution of data between entities, through a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network, where consensus algorithms ensure replication across the nodes of the network.

Nodes

A blockchain system is made up of multiple nodes, each of which has its own copy of the ledger. Nodes communicate with each other to reach consensus on the records of the ledger, eliminating the need of a central authority for coordination or verification.

Nodes also help with the entry of new data as well as the verification and transmission of submitted data on the blockchain (Lewis and Larsen, 2016). Any node can request to add any transaction. However, the transaction is accepted only if majority of the nodes agree on its validity (Boucher, 2017). When all nodes reach a consensus (Lewis, McPartland, and Ranjan, 2017), transactions are recorded on a new block and added to the existing chain (Singh and Singh, 2016). This work is known as “mining.”

Miners

Miners create new blocks on the blockchain chain by a process called mining. Each block in a blockchain has its own unique nonce and hash, which refers to the hash of the previous block in the chain.

Mining a block is a cumbersome task, especially on large chains. Miners use specialized software to solve the incredibly complex mathematical problem of finding the nonce that generates ...