Hands-On Blockchain for Python Developers

Content addressing

In a linked list, you chain together nodes (or blocks) with a pointer. A pointer is a data type that points to memory. For example, let's say we have two nodes, node A and node B. Node A is the head and node B is the tail. The structure of the node has two important components. The first component is the data component where you store the data. In Git, this data could be the content of the file. The second component is a link to another node. In a linked list, this is the pointer to a node's address.

But with content addressing, instead of just a pointer, we also add the hash of the target (in this case, node B). You may recognize this concept; this is exactly what happens in blockchain. A Merkle DAG, however, is not a ...