On today’s episode,
We understand how blockchains work, and their two basic types. We also talk about DAOs, aka Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and why they’re important.
Binance launches in Idaho, Solana goes down…again! And some tech news regarding Meta, Tesla & SpaceX.
For the full transcript, please read https://farezv.substack.com/p/farez-for-me-podcast-ep-3-what-is?s=w and subscribe to my newsletter to not miss any updates!
What is a Blockchain?
If you've ever seen an accounting ledger, you're already halfway there in your understanding of what a blockchain is. In simple terms, it's a connected list of records. Imagine a growing list of digital records, resembling real a life ledger book, known as blocks that are connected using cryptography.
These blocks each have cryptographic signature associated with another block in the chain, a timestamp, and sometransaction data signifying the connectivity of the chain. This cryptographic signature is known as a hash, it's implemented in computer code and is essentially a one-way mathematical algorithm to obfuscate simple information into complex information.
For example, there may be a function f(x) such that if x = hello, f(x) meaning f(hello) may return some value that resembles 0x43a5fc78 (which is some made up gibberish). There's no way for someone who reads 0x43a5fc78 to decode it back to the original message hello. This one-way nature of these hashing algorithms or hash functions as they're commonly known, ensures secure obfuscation of data (in this example, the term "hello"). Applying this same concept to blockchains ensures that each chain of blocks is unchangeable (especially by malicious 3rd parties).
Here’s how it works, from the book Mastering Bitcoin.
Each block within the blockchain is identified by a hash, generated using the SHA256 cryptographic hash algorithm on the header of the block. Each block also references a previous block, known as the parent block, through the “previous block hash” field in the block header. In other words, each block contains the hash of its parent inside its own header. The sequence of hashes linking each block to its parent creates a chain going back all the way to the first block ever created, known as the genesis block.
By the way, hashing is different from encryption. Encryption is two-way. Data obfuscated by encryption can be decrypted to be human readable again whereas hashing is a one way data obfuscation method.
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