Introduction In episode 11, Bill highlighted the issue of identity verification and provided a solution to this problem. The solution proposed was to cryptographically sign a transaction to verify its authenticity. Bill chose to implement a solution making use of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) as the public key can be extracted from a signature. Although a small distinction, the ability to re-compute a public key is essential in a decentralized and distributed environment.

Introduction In episode 10, Bill dove into the technical implementation of his genesis record and defined a custom Go type representing the record. While doing so, he provided an in-depth look at the reasoning behind the fields he included.. After declaring this type, Bill wrote a function that loads the genesis record from disk and onto memory. His function will use the standard library encoding/json package to load JSON data from a hard-coded file path.

Introduction In episode 9, Bill introduced the idea of the genesis record and its role in his blockchain. As a recap, the genesis record will be used to customize the settings of his blockchain. The approach Bill takes here is similar to how Ethereum operates because he is storing the record in JSON format. In this video, Bill starts by defining the Go types his blockchain will use. The first type he defines will represent the genesis record.

Introduction I made it my mission in 2022 to learn everything I could about blockchain and as the year ends, I feel like I accomplished my goal. Love it, hate it, or don’t want to know nothing about it, I think it’s important to push your opinions aside and understand how this technology works. Even with the current collapse of several large crypto companies in 2022, blockchain isn’t going to disappear.

Introduction In episode 8, Bill wanted to build a blockchain in Go and began to lay the groundwork for the project. Go is a good choice because its standard library has the necessary network and cryptographical functionality required to build a blockchain. Unlike the previous segment, Bill plans to use this blockchain to manage accounts and balances with hypothetical assets. Bill will reuse concepts from ethereum, bitcoin and the previous segment of the series to implement this blockchain.

Introduction In the first part of the series, Bill designed a dependency management system. The dependency manager needed to be distributed, transparent, cryptographically auditable and scalable. To meet these requirements, Bill borrowed concepts from blockchain. He did this to illustrate how the blockchain can be repurposed and used to accomplish the mundane task of dependency management. While doing so, Bill indirectly highlighted the problems a blockchain solves. In the next segment of the series, Bill will build a semantically correct blockchain.

Introduction In episode 6, Bill gives an overview of what consensus algorithms are and how these algorithms ensure distributed databases are in sync. Moving forward Bill will adopt the proof of authority (PoA) algorithm as a means to determine which node has the ability to write the next record. To jog your memory, PoA is a consensus mechanism where identity is used as a stake. By implementing this algorithm, Bill will add transparency to his dependency manager as he is no longer the only user with the ability to add new records.

Introduction Most apps that work with time values eventually need to display time to a user. Go has a unique way of allowing you to specify how to display time values that is different from the C library function strftime. The strftime function tends to be the standard for languages and tooling to format time. Go developed its own format specification instead of using any existing format with the idea of being able to maintain a mental model for formatting time.

Introduction In the last video, Bill left off talking about proof of work (PoW) algorithms. In a distributed and decentralized environment, PoW used to be the gold standard for a node to participate equitably in a Blockchain. However, with PoW as the number of nodes on the Blockchain increases, the amount of energy waste increases. This is because each node is performing the same computationally heavy calculation and only one node’s energy usage is leveraged to write the next block.

Introduction In case you missed episode 4, Bill attempted to integrate current database sharing solutions to solve the “database ownership” problem his dependency manager faces. He tried providing copies of the database, implementing a load balancer and replication. While performing these experiments, Bill identified the qualities his dependency manager’s database needs to have for users to trust it. He closed episode 4 by stating that his dependency manager needs a database that is distributed, cryptographically auditable, synchronized and scalable.