Understand the distributed ledger, consensus mechanisms, and cryptographic primitives that underpin all blockchain networks.
Blockchain is a chain of cryptographically linked blocks storing transactions in a distributed, immutable ledger.
Core concepts:
- Distributed ledger vs centralised database
- Hashing: SHA-256, Keccak-256 (Ethereum)
- Public/private key cryptography, digital signatures (ECDSA)
- Merkle trees — efficient transaction verification
- Consensus mechanisms:
- Proof of Work (PoW): Bitcoin, CPU-intensive mining
- Proof of Stake (PoS): Ethereum post-merge, validator staking
- Delegated PoS, Proof of Authority
- Wallets: hot vs cold, HD wallets (BIP-32/44), seed phrases
- Transactions: UTXO model (Bitcoin) vs account model (Ethereum)
- Gas: computation cost on Ethereum, base fee + priority fee (EIP-1559)
- Block finality: probabilistic (Bitcoin) vs deterministic (PoS)
- Forks: hard fork vs soft fork
Core concepts:
- Distributed ledger vs centralised database
- Hashing: SHA-256, Keccak-256 (Ethereum)
- Public/private key cryptography, digital signatures (ECDSA)
- Merkle trees — efficient transaction verification
- Consensus mechanisms:
- Proof of Work (PoW): Bitcoin, CPU-intensive mining
- Proof of Stake (PoS): Ethereum post-merge, validator staking
- Delegated PoS, Proof of Authority
- Wallets: hot vs cold, HD wallets (BIP-32/44), seed phrases
- Transactions: UTXO model (Bitcoin) vs account model (Ethereum)
- Gas: computation cost on Ethereum, base fee + priority fee (EIP-1559)
- Block finality: probabilistic (Bitcoin) vs deterministic (PoS)
- Forks: hard fork vs soft fork