Foundations of Blockchain

Block attributes

If we consider a blockchain as a data structure, then the blocks are aggregated sets of data that are used for formation of the blockchain. Blockchain formation is similar to linked list formation, where each node has a reference to the next node in the sequence. In the case of blockchain, each block has a reference to the previous node, thus forming a link all the way to the initial block (known as the genesis block) of the chain. As we mentioned earlier, a blockchain can be stored in either flat file or database format. Bitcoin uses LevelDB to store metadata about all the blocks that are downloaded to the disk.

Just like a linked list node, each block has a pointer, which is the identifier of the block. These are just hashed ...