Block Chain
Block Chain
Block Chain
Zeeshan Hanif
Qasim Shabbir
Hammad Ahmed
Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies are
shaking the system
Is Blockchain Technology the New
Internet?
Blockchain is backbone of New type of
Internet: The Decentralised Era
1. The main frames with dumb terminals (1960s)
2. The Desktop (1980s)
3. The Internet, all desktops connected (1990s)
4. Walled Gardens, all powers with big companies (Facebook, Google, Apple
and Amazon)
5. The Blockchain Era, a decentralised internet (WEB 3.0)
Web 1.0
1. Centralized Control
2. Need to Trust
3. 3rd Party/Middleman
4. No Transparency
5. Mutable
It all started with Idea: A Digital Currency
0x8aa1d85a79756bffd81e1811cff21c7dad8aee258dd1de60e116ff0fb8906738
The Core Principles of Blockchain
1. Distributed ledgers
2. Security,
3. Trustless
4. Decentralization
5. Group consensus
6. Immutability
7. Transparent
Blockchain Uses Old Technology
1. Accounting Ledger
2. Cryptography
3. Computer Network Technology/Peer-To-Peer network
Key Concepts that make blockchain secure
and immutable
1. Hashing
2. Cryptography
3. Mining
1) Hashing, one way encryption
1. A hash function takes some input data and creates some output data.
2. To expand on this concept, a hash function takes an input of any length and
creates an output of fixed length.
3. It takes an input string and created a string of random letters and numbers
“a0680c04c4eb53884be77b4e10677f2b”.
4. This is referred to as the message digest.
5. It is also known as the digital fingerprint. This is because there is no way this digest
can represent any other string. If I try and modify this the message digest will be
completely different.
One Way Street
http://www.xorbin.com/tools/sha256-hash-calculator
https://passwordsgenerator.net/sha256-hash-generator
2) Cryptography -- Public-Key encryption
Demo
http://cobweb.cs.uga.edu/~dme/csci6300/Encryption/Cryp
to.html
3) Mining and Understand Block/
Blockchains
https://anders.com/blockchain/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2019/04/16/bitcoin-is-the-new-gold/#7d19762f239a
https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2019/04/16/bitcoin-is-the-new-gold/#56a24c51239a
What is Bitcoin?
1. A Collection of concepts and technologies.
2. It behaves like conventional currencies.
3. Can be purchased, sold, and exchanged for other currencies at
specialized currency exchanges.
4. They are completely virtual with no physical existence.
2. Can I trust that the digital money can only be spent once (known as the
“double-spend” problem)?
3. Can I be sure that no one else can claim this money belongs to them and
not me?
Double Spending Problem
3. This single point of access places a very high value on the secure
generation, use, and storage of private keys.
Bitcoin: A Secure messaging system
Instead of relaying emails, texts, or web pages, the Bitcoin
network processes value-transfer messages called
transactions.
1. Alice needs a way to identify both herself and Bob in the transaction. She can’t
employ a trusted authority such as a government registry or email provider because
that would create a central point of failure — the very thing Bitcoin was created to
eliminate.
2. Alice needs a way to prevent others from changing her transaction and forging
transactions in her name.
Problem: Private key solve
1. Bitcoin solves both problems through a system called public key cryptography.
This system uses two pieces of information to authenticate messages.
5: Bob passes
Signature, Message, &
Public Key.
This format begins with the number “5” and contains a sequence of
letters and numbers.
key.
is to use the private key matching the published public key. In other
Secure private keys are generated with a high degree of unpredictability so they can’t be guessed
1. From a private key, you can easily derive the corresponding public key:
Together they form an ECDSA key pair on the secp256k1 curve. You
cannot easily derive the private key from the public key.
2. The address is then derived from the public key: First you hash the
public key with SHA-256, then you hash the result with RIPEMD-160.
The result is then formatted in Base 58 including a checksum.
Hierarchical deterministic wallet
To confirm Transaction D,
one only needs to traverse
H(AB), H(C), H(D), and
H(EFGH).
Proof of work enables trustless consensus
The main innovation that Satoshi Nakamoto introduced in his White Paper is
using so-called proof of work (POW) to create distributed trustless consensus
and solve the double-spend problem. POW is not a new idea, but the way
Satoshi combined this and other existing concepts — cryptographic signatures,
merkle chains, and P2P networks — into a viable distributed consensus
system, of which cryptocurrency is the first and basic application, was quite
innovative.
What is consensus on Money?
I will accept some token or process in payment for valuable goods or services
if:
1. it comes from a scarce supply using one of the accepted means of value
exchange and creation.
2. I expect that everyone else will accept this token as money of comparable
value.
Bitcoin protocol assigns a preset amount of newly issued currency for every
block to the miner who first assembled it with the correct proof of work. This,
along with transaction fees, incentivizes miners to perform the work that is
required to create consensus for the entire network. This is why mining is so
called — because it can be paralleled to the process of “digging” for new
bitcoins.
Trust of Correctness
The difference between a good state and a bad state is that of consensus only, that is if
we can all agree on which one is good and simply ignore the other one, we will have
solved the problem.
Based on the cryptographic features of the hash function used in this process, finding
such a rare number is hard, but verifying its validity when it is found is easy.
For the ledger to be considered self-consistent we require that every block contain such
rare number whose hardness we control based on the size of the participating network
(a value expressed as a hash-rate).
POW - Conclusion
POW is only useful when trustless consensus is required, otherwise it is an expensive
and needless waste of resources.
There now exist solutions which do not use POW, but still strive to achieve distributed
trustless consensus.