Vitalik Buterin conceptualized Ethereum in November, 2013.   The critical idea proposed was the development of a Turing-complete language that allows the development of arbitrary programs (smart contracts) for blockchain and decentralized applications.   This concept is in contrast to Bitcoin, where the scripting language is limited in nature and allows necessary operations only.   […]

Altcoin projects can be started very quickly from a coding point of view by simply forking the bitcoin or another coin’s source code, but this probably is not enough.   When a new coin project is started, several things need to be considered to ensure a successful launch and the coin’s longevity.   Usually, the […]

Various limitations in Bitcoin have also sparked some interest in altcoins, which were developed specifically to address limitations in Bitcoin.   The most prominent and widely discussed limitation is the lack of anonymity in Bitcoin.   Privacy and Anonymity As the blockchain is a public ledger of all transactions and is openly available, it becomes […]

Mining is a process by which new blocks are added to the blockchain.   Blocks contain transactions that are validated via the mining process by mining nodes on the Bitcoin network.   Blocks, once mined and verified are added to the blockchain which keeps the blockchain growing.   This process is resource-intensive due to the […]

Blockchain is a public ledger of a timestamped, ordered, and immutable list of all transactions on the Bitcoin network.   Each block is identified by a hash in the chain and is linked to its previous block by referencing the previous block’s hash.   In the following table structure of a block is presented, followed […]

Bitcoin Transactions Transactions are at the core of the bitcoin ecosystem. Transactions can be as simple as just sending some bitcoins to a bitcoin address, or it can be quite complex depending on the requirements.   Each transaction is composed of at least one input and output. Inputs can be thought of as coins being […]

Introduction Bitcoin has started a revolution with the introduction of the very first fully decentralized digital currency, and the one that has proven to be extremely secure and stable from a network and protocol point of view.   As a currency bitcoin is quite unstable and highly volatile, albeit valuable.   Since its introduction in […]

The consensus algorithms in blockchain can be classified into two broad categories: Traditional—voting-based consensus Lottery-based—Nakamoto and post-Nakamoto consensus   Traditional voting-based consensus has been researched in distributed systems for many decades. Algorithms like Paxos and PBFT are prime examples of such types of algorithms.   Traditional consensus can also be called fault-tolerant distributed consensus. In […]