Building Blockchain in Go. Part 2: Proof-of-Work

1.区块链和比特币的重点之一就是添加新的区块是一项非常难的工作。

2.POW：This whole “do hard work and prove” mechanism is called proof-of-work. 说它难是因为需要非常多的算力， Moreover, the difficulty of this work increases from time to time to keep new blocks rate at about 6 blocks per hour.In Bitcoin, the goal of such work is to find a hash for a block, that meets some requirements. And it’s this hash that serves as a proof. Thus, finding a proof is the actual work. Proof-of-Work algorithms must meet a requirement: doing the work is hard, but verifying the proof is easy. A proof is usually handed to someone else, so for them, it shouldn’t take much time to verify it.

3.Hashing: Hashing is a process of obtaining a hash for specified data. A hash is a unique representation of the data it was calculated on. A hash function is a function that takes data of arbitrary size and produces a fixed size hash. Here are some key features of hashing:

1. Original data cannot be restored from a hash. Thus, hashing is not encryption. (原始数据不能被存储在hash中，hash不是加密)
2. Certain data can have only one hash and the hash is unique.
3. Changing even one byte in the input data will result in a completely different hash.（即使修改一个字节的数据也会导致完全不同的hash）

Hashing functions are widely used to check the consistency of data.

In blockchain, hashing is used to guarantee the consistency of a block. The input data for a hashing algorithm contains the hash of the previous block, thus making it impossible (or, at least, quite difficult) to modify a block in the chain: one has to recalculate its hash and hashes of all the blocks after it.

4.Hashcash：Bitcoin uses Hashcash, a Proof-of-Work algorithm （详细请见原文）

5.Implementation：(详细请见原文)

You can think of a target as the upper boundary of a range: if a number (a hash) is lower than the boundary, it’s valid, and vice versa. Lowering the boundary will result in fewer valid numbers, and thus, more difficult work required to find a valid one.

6.Conclusion

Our blockchain is a step closer to its actual architecture: adding blocks now requires hard work, thus mining is possible. But it still lacks some crucial features: the blockchain database is not persistent, there are no wallets, addresses, transactions, and there’s no consensus mechanism. All these things we’ll implement in future articles, and for now, happy mining!

 

转载于:https://my.oschina.net/muskadorer/blog/2046433