Get a clear understanding of what a blockchain is and how it works, and learn about popular cryptocurrencies, crypto wallets and their important role in mediating a user’s experience in the web3 ecosystem.
Exactly How Bad Is Bitcoin For The Environment? | Answers With Joe
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have taken the world by storm, but they’ve also become controversial due to the amount of energy they use. Is Bitcoin as bad for the environment as people say? Or is it all a matter of perspective?
An Introduction to How Blockchains Work with Anders Brownworth
Real Vision crypto editor Ash Bennington welcomes Anders Brownworth to walk through a step-by-step of how blockchains work. Brownworth explains the basics of hashing, blocks, and then blockchains, demonstrating how each piece builds upon the other to create the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies. Filmed on May 20, 2021. Key Learnings: Those who are unfamiliar with blockchain technology can experience a steep learning curve when trying to understand how it works—Brownworth breaks it down into a simple, easy-to-digest format with visual aids that allow the viewer to conceptualize blockchain technology.
Blockchain Technology Explained
This “Blockchain Technology Explained” video will help you learn basic concepts of Blockchain technology, some of the challenges companies had been facing before Blockchain, how bitcoin solved the issues in banking industry, features of Blockchain – public distributed ledger, proof of work, and mining. Finally, you will also see a use case implementation demonstrating Blockchain mining. Blockchain technology today is very robust and there are a lot of aspects like the programming language, distributed ledger, bitcoin cryptocurrency and many more. Now, lets deep dive into this video and take a look at how Blockchain Technology works in detail.
Blockchain cryptography [8 of 20] | Beginner’s Series to: Blockchain
One of the primary advantages of blockchain is that it is secure. Understand more about hashing functions, and public and private keys, and how they work to make transactions on blockchain safe.
Hashing, Encryption, and Digital Signatures
You MUST understand Cryptographic Hashing for blockchain
This video describes cryptography and encryption with a focus on hashing.
Cryptoeconomics – 3.3 – Merkle Trees
The use of hashing and
What is Hashing on the Blockchain?
Hashing is generating a value or values from a string of text using a mathematical function.
Hashing is one way to enable security during the process of message transmission when the message is intended for a particular recipient only. A formula generates the hash, which helps to protect the security of the transmission against tampering.
Cryptographic hashing is a key feature in the security and efficiency of blockchains. If you’ve ever wondered how so much data can be stored securely on every node in the network, hashing is a big part of the answer
Cryptographic Hash Functions
A cryptographic hash function is a special class of hash functions which has various properties making it ideal for cryptography. There are certain properties that a cryptographic hash function needs to have in order to be considered secure. Let’s run through them one by one.
Property 1: Deterministic
This means that no matter how many times you parse through a particular input through a hash function you will always get the same result. This is critical because if you get different hashes every single time it will be impossible to keep track of the input.
Property 2: Quick Computation
The hash function should be capable of returning the hash of an input quickly. If the process isn’t fast enough then the system simply won’t be efficient.
Property 3: Pre-Image Resistance
What pre-image resistance states is that given H(A) it is infeasible to determine A, where A is the input and H(A) is the output hash. Notice the use of the word “infeasible” instead of “impossible”. We already know that it is not impossible to determine the original input from its hash value.
Let’s take an example.
Suppose you are rolling a dice and the output is the hash of the number that comes up from the dice. How will you be able to determine what the original number was? All you have to do is find the hashes of all numbers from 1-6 and compare. Since hash functions are deterministic, the hash of a particular input will always be the same, so you can simply compare the hashes and find out the original input.
But this only works when the given amount of data is low. What happens when you have a huge amount of data? Suppose you are dealing with a 128-bit hash. The only method that you have to find the original input is by using the “brute-force method”. Brute-force method basically means that you have to pick up a random input, hash it and then compare the output with the target hash and repeat until you find a match.