Blockchain technology was invented to be the backbone for Bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency. It is a distributed ledger spread across a permissioned or permissionless network. The participants of this network are referred to as nodes. Each node contains a copy of the ledger. To update the ledger, the participants in the network will propose a transaction or a set of transactions that should be added next to the ledger. Once the participants in the network come to an agreement on the next set of transactions, they will add the transactions to their local copy of the ledger. This way, the sanctity and uniformity of the ledger across the nodes are maintained.
Data is added in "blocks" of transactions. Each block contains the hash value of the header of the previous block. (A hash function generates a unique output of fixed length for...