Mindmaps

This will contain a collection of 'mindmaps' in a list form based around different parts of cryptocurrency. These can be used for revision purposes.

Blocks

Header

  • This contains metadata - information about the (information of the) block.
    • Version
      • Describes the 'standard' of the block - miners can know what structure the data is in and the conventions that the version is associated with.
    • Last Block (Previous Block Hash)
      • Identification number for the previous block.
    • Transactions (Merkle Root)
      • All the transactions are hashed into a single string using the Merkle Root.
    • Time
      • The current time of when the block was created.
    • Target (Nonce)
      • This is calculated by the 'difficulty value' set by the cryptocurrency network to regulate how hard it is to add a block to the network. (Basically people need to keep incrementing the nonce (alongside the hash data) until the value of the hash is below the target value - related to hashing)
    • Nonce
      • This is a value that people can use to verify that the block was mined properly.

Genesis Block

  • This block is one without a value in the header for the previous block
    • This means that the block is the first in the blockchain (the one that starts the chain)

Blockchain

  • The blockchain is basically many blocks linked together. In the header for each block, they're linked to the hash of the previous block. The validity of the chain is dependent on the previous block being integral, meaning that if you wanted to change a transaction in one block in the chain, you would need to find the correct nonce for all the previous blocks beforehand faster than the rest of the mining pool.

Security

Immutable Transactions

Hashing

  • Hashing is a one-way function - meaning that it's very easy to hash a string, but very hard to reverse engineer.
  • Hashing typically provides a result that's of a fixed length and random. When even one character in the hash changes, the output of the hash completely changes.

Nonce

  • Nonce stands for Number only used once.
  • This nonce and the transaction data in a block are hashed together to create a block hash. If this block hash is lower than the target, then the nonce will have been found, and mining will have succeeded.

Digital Signatures

  • This is used to identify the owner of a currency.

Mining

Mining Pool

51% Attack

This happens when a single party has more than 51% of the share of the mining pool.

Transactions