You do know what a blockchain is by now, and we are sure you have a good idea of how it works if you made it this far. In this chapter we will take a detailed look at each concept that makes a blockchain work individually. It’s worth noting that Bitcoin and thus blockchain as we know it is more than ten years old by now, but most concepts described in this chapter preceded blockchains by years or even decades. The clever combination of these parts in a formerly unknown way enabled something truly impressive.
Public Key Cryptography
Here, we look at public-key cryptography, the concept that allows digital scarcity and ownership of data to exist. We have split this important article up in three parts: Elliptic Curve Cryptography, a specifc PKC scheme, the process of deriving an address from a private key and lastly, digital signatures.
Consensus Mechanisms
One of the great innovations introduced with blockchain was solving the Byzantine Generals Problem: coming to consensus in a setting with many unknown and untrustworthy actors. Consensus mechanisms allow blockchains to achieve just that. In this subchapter we explain consensus in distributed systems, Proof of Work and other consensus mechanisms.
Blockchain Governance
Without a central party coordinating software development, updates and the release of new features, new types of decentralized governance have emerged. We take a look at some of the decision making processes in public blockchain protocols.
