Blockchain & Cryptocurrency – Key Concepts to Know

blockchain concepts

The following are some of the most popular Blockchain and Cryptocurrency jargons or terminologies or concepts that are good to know when you are delving into technology landscape of Blockchain.

Blockchain (What is Blockchain Technology?)
- Genesis block: The first block of a blockchain.
- Merkel’s tree algorithm: It is fundamental to blockchain technology. Simply speaking, a Merkle tree summarizes all the transactions in a block by producing a digital fingerprint of the entire set of transactions, thereby enabling a user to verify whether or not a transaction is included in a block.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency exchanges: These are businesses which allow users to trade cryptocurrencies for other assets.
Distributed ledger: Blockchain is one type of Distributed ledger.
Blockchain explorer
Blockchain wallet
Bitcoin (BTC)
Mining
- How does Blockchain mining works?
Consensus algorithms: The following are some of the popular consensus algorithms:
- Proof-of-work (PoW) – Popular implementations include Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum etc.
- Proof-of-stake (PoS)- Peercoin
- Delegated Proof-of-stake (DPoS)
- Proof-of-Authority (PoA)
- Proof-of-Weight
- Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)
- Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)
Ethereum (ETH) (https://www.ethereum.org/)
Types of Blockchain networks
- Public (Anyone can join. For example, Bitcoin)
- Public permissioned (Anyone can join with a permission)
- private or permissioned (These Blockchains are private to the businesses)
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) (https://www.bitcoincash.org/). Read the difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash on this page.
Hyperledger frameworks (https://www.hyperledger.org/)
Popular coins
- Bitcoin
- Bitcoin Cash
- Ethereum
- Litecoin
- Ripple
- ZCash
- Dash

Author
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Ajitesh Kumar

I have been recently working in the area of Data analytics including Data Science and Machine Learning / Deep Learning. I am also passionate about different technologies including programming languages such as Java/JEE, Javascript, Python, R, Julia, etc, and technologies such as Blockchain, mobile computing, cloud-native technologies, application security, cloud computing platforms, big data, etc. I would love to connect with you on Linkedin.
Check out my latest book titled as First Principles Thinking: Building winning products using first principles thinking.

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Ajitesh Kumar

I have been recently working in the area of Data analytics including Data Science and Machine Learning / Deep Learning. I am also passionate about different technologies including programming languages such as Java/JEE, Javascript, Python, R, Julia, etc, and technologies such as Blockchain, mobile computing, cloud-native technologies, application security, cloud computing platforms, big data, etc. I would love to connect with you on Linkedin. Check out my latest book titled as First Principles Thinking: Building winning products using first principles thinking.