February 2018
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
6h 58m
English
Content preview from Ethereum Smart Contract Development
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Understanding a blockchain–a developer and trader's perspective
From a software developer's perspective, a blockchain is just a giant Merkle tree. Take a moment now, pause your reading. Let this information sink in. I repeat with another layer of clarity.
A blockchain is a giant Merkle tree, where each new block embeds the hash of the previous block as well as the root hash of the present block-action, eventually forming a chain of hash-blocks. It might be not very obvious, but such a Merkle tree structure does not require a central server; each block can come from physically separate clients. Hence, a blockchain is also a distributed system. I can feel you are starting to feel confused right now. Just look at Figure 1.5 to mitigate some ...