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Blockchains explained visually (part 1 of 2)
- IgorPartola 9y agoThis part of the blockchain always made perfect sense to me. The magic is in the proof of work and proof of stale stuff as well as smart contracts.
- unwttng 9y agoI think the logical split I've made between those two areas is a good one since people tend to be in one of two camps in terms of how comfortable they are with all this. Hopefully I can do justice to the second part.
- ahussain 9y agoThe best explanation of blockchain has to be (unsurprisingly) 3Blue1Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4 Would highly recommend watching this video for anyone who hasn't already.
- viewtransform 9y agoI second this. This was the explanation where I finally understood the big picture of ledgers, blockchain & proof of work
- andreasklinger 9y agoMy favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_160oMzblY8 It explains from ground up without getting complicated - it basically demystifies the whole thing completely i give this to everyone - even to non technical people
- sdfin 9y agoThank you! I enjoyed the video and was able to understand better the basics of cryptocurrencies by watching it.
- dvt 9y agoI've seen this before and it's so awesome. Best block chain explanation I've ever come across (much better than 3blue1brown imo).
- exolab 9y agoWhere is part 2? :)
- clydethefrog 9y agoWhat a great video. Explaining the database model of blockchain without all the scripture.
- dEnigma 9y agoI was about to write the same thing. The 3b1b video is my gold standard for blockchain explanations. I also have high hopes for his ongoing neural network series[0], but haven't yet found time to watch the first two videos. [0]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700...
- sundvor 9y agoThanks, will watch! I'm interested in learning Blockchain dev myself, and listened to this a couple of days ago on my commute. Found it very good: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/12/blockchain-building-with-daniel-van-flymen/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/12/blockchain-b...
- dnautics 9y agoI came here to post the same link! I'm always amazed at the number of programmers who pooh pooh blockchains as a fad (they probably are a bit oversold at the moment) but when they realize what they are and how they work, go hmm.
- unwttng 9y agoAbsolutely agree with this. It's a shame that for the moment such a revolutionary technology is getting so tied up with _super_ shady stuff. For every 10 awful Ponzi ICOs there's a real gem of someone using new tech to really try and push boundaries.
- dnautics 9y agoI wouldn't worry about it. This phenomenon is true, maybe to a lower degree of mania, for technologies past (trains, exploration, gold rushes, every tech bubble) and present (crispr, biologics)
- unwttng 9y agoMe too!
- gtrubetskoy 9y agoThere's also the oldie but goodie James D'Angelo Bitcoin 101 videos, the blockchain one is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwXCt1qkBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwXCt1qkBU The elliptic curve one is fascinating, where he has it implemented in like 30 lines of Python and no outside dependencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB3HcPgm_FI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB3HcPgm_FI Edit: EC is a 2-part, second part is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2bw_N6kQL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2bw_N6kQL8
- caylorme 9y ago"it's quite customary to represent hashes in hexadecimal notation (that is, using 0-9 and a-z) - that's what we'll use in this article." -- hexadecimal is 0-9 and a-f
- chrisaycock 9y agoIEEE Spectrum has a special report about blockchains: https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/special-report-blockchain-world https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/special-report-blockchain-w... It goes into permissioned ledgers and smart contracts, among other applications.
- Freak_NL 9y ago> Toggle pointless gifs off First time I've seen that. That should really be the standard for any author who decides to pepper their articles with 'memes' and other unrelated distractions. Perhaps this is a cultural or generational thing that I am interpreting in the wrong way, but whenever I follow a link to a blog post filled with these kinds of distracting animated pictures I tend to just give up on the article after encountering the first one. I just can't fathom why someone who wishes to inform or enlighten readers on a certain topic feels the need to include a plethora of irrelevant distractions. Nice to have a way to turn them off so I can give the article a chance based on its merits rather than the presence of memes.
- Moru 9y agoThere was a lot of complaints a few weeks ago on an article with animated gifs. That person changed the homepage with a toggle, mabe it's the same person?
- unwttng 9y agoIt's the same person! That person is me.
- PappaPatat 9y agoHi Jack, thanks for the nice write up, I will happily revere people who like to understand some basics of the blockchain to it. A pity you site does not (yet :P ) have an rss feed for I'd like to follow your efforts.
- avip 9y agoWe want the shitcoin.com domain!
- abrkn 9y agoThat's me. Maybe I'll do a no GIF version for my next review.
- 9y ago
- tristan_ph 9y agothis is still my favorite https://anders.com/blockchain/ https://anders.com/blockchain/
- segmondy 9y agoyup, I was able to implement a basic blockchain at once the moment I watched that demo.
- monokh 9y ago> See how the hash-chaining mechanism of a blockchain means that even a single corrupt or tampered-with block will invalidate the entire chain after it. Is that strictly required to understand that the entire chain is invalidated? Since blocks are in order, if block X's previous hash doesn't check out, can't we just assume that every block thereafter is also invalid? Effectively a fork has happened at X-1 block. I'm guessing there are more dynamics (speed?) that come into this. Maybe the following questions will make it more clear: 1. How do the blocks update when there is a change in a past block? 2. In the real world, what process does a node use to validate the chain on an ongoing basis?
- abrkn 9y agoSee https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Chain_Reorganization https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Chain_Reorganization
- Buttes 9y agoSomeone can mine and broadcast blocks that reference an old block, nodes will store the block, in case more are published and it becomes the longest chain, but will otherwise ignore it.
- cslarson 9y agoFYI, in the first paragraph you misspelled Ethereum as "Etherium".
- k__ 9y agoI always read that crypto currencies will replace money, because they are distributed. But does a blockchain, that is at the core of every(?) crypto currency really scale well? Keeping the whole ledger constantly available seems rather storage and traffic intensive to me.
- davidgerard 9y agotl;dr no. Bitcoin has a theoretical limit of 7 transactions/sec (or 4200/10min) for everyone in the world. Ethereum can do up to about 14-16 tx/sec. There are plans to fix this - sharding on Ethereum, Lightning Network on Bitcoin - but both are largely vaporware at this stage. In practice, a lot of the transaction action happens inside the individual exchanges, not on the blockchain itself - so we already have a "level 1" and "level 2" system. Also, there's issues of securing your bitcoins - "be your own bank" means "be your own extremely knowledgeable chief security officer". This is why even a lot of big holders keep a lot of money on exchanges (and lost lots in Mt. Gox). And why losses due to human error are extremely common. The blockchain is more interesting than useful.
- JudasSicarius 9y ago"In practice, a lot of the transaction action happens inside the individual exchanges, not on the blockchain itself - so we already have a "level 1" and "level 2" system." Can you expand on this a bit? Is it somewhat analogous to the role that dark pools play in the stock market?
- davidgerard 9y agoBy quantity a hell of a lot more individual trades happen on the exchanges than on chain. It's not hidden - just not as radically transparent as on-chain transactions. But obviously harder to gather data on, has none of the blockchain's cryptographic guarantees, etc. It turns out the actual traders care more about getting a good price than the ideological basis for the blockchain. And that's even in a situation where you can't really trust the exchanges - rife with insider trading, wash trades, front running, spoofing, whether a Tether can be counted as a dollar, etc., things that are highly illegal in normal security trading. As long as the number keeps going up, everyone seems okay with this.
- baby 9y agoSkip this article (which hilariously tries to rename and redefine a hash properties) and play with this instead: https://anders.com/blockchain/ https://anders.com/blockchain/
- seanalltogether 9y agoOne thing that never clicked with me before is that the blockchain is really just a historical ledger, its not actually referenced in real time. When you send a transaction out on the network, nobody is actually validating it against the blockchain. Instead every node is expected to process the blockchain to produce a realtime database called the UXTO which provides a fast lookup to tell you if coins can be spent or not. So the blockchain is a history or transactions, while the UXTO is a statement of all current balances. So while the BTC blockchain is 137 GB in size, the UXTO is only 2.7 GB which easily fits in memory.
- Buttes 9y agoAnd you really only need to track UXTO for your own address if you're not a full node, and that will be very small.
- zeep 9y ago> hexadecimal notation (that is, using 0-9 and a-z) should be hexadecimal notation (that is, using 0-9 and a-f)
- doodpants 9y agoThat jumped out at me too. At first I thought, "does the author not understand how hexadecimal works, or is this merely a case of sloppiness or imprecision in his description?" Then I got to the part that said: > There shouldn't be loads of them that start with an "A", or loads that end with ten "X"s, or anything like that. This leads me to further doubt about the author's grasp of hexadecimal.
- gtrubetskoy 9y agoNice. You should probably mention that what you are describing is a variant of a Merkle tree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
- sAbakumoff 9y agoI just would like to say thanks to the author for spending his time on this article. I found it very well written and I look forward to seeing part 2. I recommend this article to everyone who asks me about the blockchain technology.
- Cognitron 9y agoSomething I noticed, but didn't see in the article (unless I just missed it). In reference to the security part at the end, if the hash only included the previous block's data, and not its previous hash. If you could edit two consecutive blocks you could change, say, block 2's data and block 3's previous hash. Now everything looks fine because this doesn't change block 3's data so block 4's previous hash looks fine and everything looks legit. Seems like a greater concern than breaking the chain because it wouldn't be detected unless you compared two versions of the chain.
- t0mislav 9y agoNice and eloquent! Will read also other articles.