Project information

Inspiration

I always wondered what made cryptocurrencies like bitcoin secure, mineable and easily accesible. As it turns out, thousands of calculations happen under the hood to make it all possible.

Explanation

Blockchain is a timestamped append-only ledger that utilizes cleared uses of hashes and cryptographic keys. This specific implementation uses a proof-of-work consensus algorithm to append to the ledger. Every addition to the blockchain must abide by the proof-of-work consensus algorithm by finding a nonce that results in a hash with a certain amount of leading zeros. Since hash functions result in unpredictable results, there is no better method to find a valid nonce by pure brute force (work). Every new addition to the ledger is assumed to be malicious, and therefore, individually verified.

Takeaways

I managed to gain an intimate understanding of various methods of encryption and security while learning Go.