We are going to illustrate a simple blockchain project to help you get a better understanding of how the technology works. The proper way to go through this website is to start with the 'blockchain technology page', then 'chain architecture page' and finish with 'blockchain DAPP' page. These are our main education pages, where you can have simple interactions with different elements of the blockchain architecture.
The problem we are trying to solve here is keeping records for a fictional professional engineering council. Engineers need to register with this council, and emplyers need to be able to make a quick enquiry to the database to confirm data about a member. The data members enter also needs to be verified by their supervisors before its added to the database. We need to ensure the data is entered by the correct engineer, approved by the supervisor and cannot be changed in the future.
The blockchain technology page introduces the concept of transactions and signatures. Here both engineers and supervisors have accounts, the engineers enter the data or transactions and the supervisors approve those transactions (a dual function - they are approving the data in the transaction, but also confirming that the transaction was addded by the correct person, through signature verification.
The chain sections introduces the complete block as the application starts to mine blocks. For simplicity our blocks will be mined at regular intervals with no difficulty adjustment, however we have introduced a static difficulty in the form of a nonce calculation to demonstrate the concept of mining difficuly if you needed to produce a chain with varrying difficulty.
the complete chain will simply be a combination of these connected blocks, as a new block is mined over an existing block.
Finally to bring the project together, we will build a simple web-application that interacts with the complete blockchain. Generally you will need such a front-end application to monitor and write data to the blockchain. You might need to extract data from the blockchain, imagine this chain is a database - you write to it and get data from it.
This whole system will be decentralised, meaning the supervisor and engineer do not even have to be in the same country. Our web-application is a centralised front end, but in practice you can access the same data from any node - or connected computer. As we connect more nodes to the chain, we make it more decentralised, harder to alter, hence more secure.
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