ethereum_blockchain.md

Introduction Blockchain.

• The Short Unofficial Definition
  • Blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, the special block & chain structure and crypotography make the distributed ledger trustless.
• The Basic Characteristics: Distributed, trustless, immutable, accountable -> Therefore can be DECENTRALIZED
  • Distributed: distributed ledger, managed by peer-to-peer(p2p) network (For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks)
    • Centralized: all nodes are connected to the central node. Lead to single point of failure, scaling issue, and inefficiency problem
  • Trustless: It is Anti-fraud by consensus mechanism design (PoW made bitcoin the first digital currency to solve the double spending problem without the need of a trusted authority or central server.)
  • Immutable: Records are immutable by blocks & chaining design (Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority.)
  • Accountable: Records are accountable by cryptography implementation
• Introduction To Bitcoin.
  • "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", authored by the name Satoshi Nakamoto in Oct., 2008.
  • It's released as open-source software in Jan., 2009.
  • It's blockchain's first successful application(project), has all of the basic characteristics of blockchain.

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Basic Concepts

Transactions

key	description
nonce	times the sender has sent a trasactions
to	the target address the ether is sent to
value	amount of ether is sent to the target address
gasPrice	amount of ethere is willing to pay per unit gas to get the transaction processedd
startGas/gasLimit	maximum units of gas that the transaction can consume
v	signature
r	signature
s	signature

• signature: can be used to geberated the sender address, generated from sender's private key

Cryptography

• sign:
  • data + privatekey => signature
• verify:
  • signature + data + address => the person who sign the signature must knows the privatekey
• notes:
  • address is the publickey (on ethereum)
  • publickey is generated from the private key
  • idealy, knows the privatekey == it's owner

Accounts

• create